Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Yahoo Aims to Mainstream Hadoop with New Security and Workflow Offerings

Yahoo made a significant announcement at its Hadoop Summit today. The company says it's made significant enhancements to the open source software, accelerating the potential for enterprise-wide adoption by mainstream businesses.

"Hadoop is where science meets big data – it's the technical underpinning that powers our innovative consumer and advertiser products on the world's most-advanced digital canvas," says Blake Irving, Yahoo Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer. "Yahoo!’s cloud and Hadoop make it possible for Yahoo! to rapidly personalize our content and advertising, and deliver highly relevant experiences, while maintaining the trust of our 600 million users."

Yahoo says Hadoop plays a key role in its home page, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Mail, and other properties.

"Businesses across all sectors are looking for ways to leverage the vast quantities of data they are accumulating, and Apache Hadoop is an efficient solution for processing data at scale," says Melanie Posey, research director at IDC Research. "Now organizations of various sizes can leverage Yahoo!'s Hadoop investment and deployments to run it on their own systems and build out their own Hadoop deployments without starting from scratch on internal science experiments."

Specifically, Yahoo announced the beta release of Hadoop with Security and Oozie, the company's workflow engine for Hadoop. This means enterprises will benefit from better controls for managing business-sensitive data, according to the company.

Monday, June 28, 2010

PayPal Lets Apps Accept Credit Cards

PayPal has announced that it now accepts credit cards in apps. The company's payments platform, PayPal X, now has a Guest Payments feature.

"With this new feature, developers will now be able to accept credit card payments without requiring customers to open up a PayPal account," a spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews.


Guest Payments is a product of PayPal's Adaptive Payments API, and has been a heavily requested feature for users. PayPal says Guest Payments eliminates the complications merchants, developers, and startups face in accepting credit cards.

"We're aware that no matter how innovative the ideas are, our developers look to us to provide the features to make it all possible," says Naveed Anwar, senior director of PayPal's Developer Network. " We're thrilled to provide this new functionality to meet this need and look forward to seeing the ground-breaking apps our developer community will create with this."

Friday, June 11, 2010

Google's Blogger Users Can Now Customize Their Designs

Google has announced tah the Blogger Template Designer is now available to all (not just Blogger in Draft).
Original Article: Google has launched the Blogger Template Designer, a way to customize the look and feel of your Blogger blog.

"Over the past few years we've worked to scale Blogger and ensure that it is capable of handling hundreds of millions of pageviews per day," Google says. "But we also believe that blogging is about self expression and that an important part of expression is creating a custom design that expresses your unique voice. So last year we started working on a tool that would allow everyone to easily customize their blog’s look and feel, and today we’re proud to introduce the Blogger Template Designer."



Features of the template designer include:

- 15 new templates (with more on the way)
- Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
- Hundreds of background images courtesy of iStockphoto
- Customizable colors, fonts, and more.
"While alternative offerings force users to choose among a limited set of rigid template designs, Blogger provides an intuitive yet powerful interface so anyone to customize their blog's design & layout - putting the user in complete control," the company says.

PayPal Announces Some Pricing Changes

Today, PayPal announced that it is making some changes to its user agreements and pricing. The changes are specifically related to refunds, chargebacks, and Amex payments.

PayPal senior director of SMB Merchant Services Eddie Davis outlines the following changes:

  1. Refund Prices – Starting August 10, PayPal will retain the transaction fee (typically $.30) when a seller issues a refund (U.S. and Canada merchants).

  2. Chargeback Prices – Starting August 24, we’ll be increasing chargeback costs from $10 to the typical industry rate of $20 (U.S. merchants only, eBay merchants enrolled in the PayPal Preferred program are exempt).
  3. American Express Card Acceptance – On July 13, PayPal and American Express will enter into a new card processing arrangement that requires merchants to establish a direct contractual relationship with American Express. You’ll need to accept a new agreement with American Express if you want to continue to accept American Express cards directly through Website Payments Pro and Virtual Terminal. PayPal will continue to service American Express transactions. As part of this new agreement, the fees we charge for American Express payments will change to be on par with their typical industry rates. You’ll also need to make sure that you comply with other terms in the agreement with American Express. As part of this new agreement, American Express pricing will change to be on par with their typical industry rates. You’ll also need to make sure that you comply with other terms in the agreement with American Express. This only applies to taking American Express credit cards directly. There’s no change if a consumer chooses to pay with PayPal, no matter how the account is funded
Davis notes that standard transaction fees for PayPal payments and direct credit card payments for Visa, MasterCard, and Discover will remain unchanged.