PayPal has announced that it’s wading into the world of mobile payments with the announcement of a new texting service, PayPal Mobile.
PayPal Mobile will let users send money, purchase items or donate to charities from their mobile devices and the Text to Buy service wil let impatient shippers grab goods by sending product codes via text message – so long as both buyer and seller are in the same country.
The eBay owned outfit will be launching the new service in the UK, Canada and the US over the course of the month, and any PayPal user who’s registered their mobile through their online account will be able to use the service.
The system uses ‘short codes’ – these are the five digit numbers you see on TV when you’re being invited to enter a competition or vote some ghastly E-list celeb off some equally ghastly reality show.
“With the overwhelming popularity of mobile phones, the time has never been better for the merging of ecommerce and wireless devices,” trumpeted PayPal President Jeff Jordan.
“PayPal already has more than 100 million accounts worldwide, and our customers have already entrusted their personal and financial information to PayPal. Now, making payments is as easy as sending a text message anytime, from anywhere for the millions of customers that prefer to use PayPal,” he continued, with a worrying amount of enthusiasm.
Business
A company signed up to PayPal Mobile can place product codes on items for sales along with PayPal’s short code phone number. These can appear on their websites, on ebay or in magazines and TV ads.
Punters suitably salivated by the product and ready to get buying can then text the product code to PayPal to pay for their item.
Person to person
For cash transactions between people, users have to input the amount of money (don’t do this when drunk, folks!) and then add the recipient’s mobile number to the PayPal short code.
An automated system reads the received text and then calls the PayPal user back and prompts them to enter their PIN.
PayPal Mobile payments are backed by PayPal’s fraud prevention system and the system ensures that financial information is never shared with the recipient.
With financial information being stored on PayPal’s secure servers, and not on the phones themselves, the user’s PayPal account should remain secure even if the phone is ‘alf-inched.
It’s with absolutely no surprise that news reaches us that the number of text (SMS) messages has reached a record high.
With a triumphant beat of its kodachrome chest, Kodak has announced the world’s smallest 10x optical zoom camera, the 6-megapixel KODAK EASYSHARE V610 dual lens digital camera
Naturally, this little fella shoots video – managing TV-quality (VGA) footage at 30 frames per second (fps) – saved out as MPEG-4 files with Kodak’s “video-specific image stabilisation technology” claiming to reduce that wobbly jelly camera effect.
When it comes to auto modes, Kodak haven’t held back with no less than twenty-two scene modes, three colour modes and a custom mode, along with selectable exposure metering, exposure compensation, focus zones, ISO, and single/continuous auto-focus for precise control.
So you’ve shelled out for your new smartphone/PDA and you’re ready to watch your productivity soar as you strut around with an office in your pocket.
Like most annoyingly compelling games, Bejeweled is dead simple to play and takes seconds to learn.
In the original Bejeweled (available on Palm, Pocket PC and Windows Mobile) there’s an additional timed mode to add a frantic air to the gameplay, while its sequel, Bejeweled2 (available on Palm and Pocket PC), ramps up the bells and whistles offering four play modes, bonus play modes, explosive Power Gems, Hyper Cubes and Time Bombs and arcade-style noisy effects (which can be turned off).
You can download trial versions of both games from 
If, like the Temptations, you find yourself wishing it would rain or you just like to belt out tunes in the shower, Pioneer’s new waterproof headphones might be just the things for you.
Of course, there’s no point having waterproof headphones if your player gets slippery when wet, so anyone looking to go surfin’ USA might be interested in checking out the range of waterproof iPod/iriver cases from h2o Audio.
Uber music giants EMI Music Publishing have announced a deal with hotshot VoIP upstarts Skype to sell music on Skype’s new retail website.
Roger Faxon co-CEO of EMI Music Publishing was ready and willing for some Monday morning gushing, dishing out the kudos to Skype, EMI and composer royalty collectors the MCPS-PRS Alliance for their help.
Proving Niche is alive and living on UK IPTV pioneer HomeChoice, they’ve today announced an African Movie Channel, self described as “the UK’s first channel dedicated to showing new and recent releases from the major African film production houses.”
On another side, we see that 
Attacks against non-Windows operating systems – particularly Linux – are growing quickly, according to a Kaspersky Lab report.
Those Mac bugs
The Zicplay MiniKey is a tiny audio player. It comes in versions from 256MB to 1GB. There’s also a version with a built in FM tuner. The version we tested was the 512Mb model.