Having your service go down on your customers is certainly not a great way to close out the year. But PayPal developers are reporting that subscriptions are down, and have been for a couple of days. This is the second time this year that PayPal has experienced an issue with processing of subscription payments. In September, TechCrunch reported on an outage at PayPal that lasted a few days.

A message posted on the PayPal developer discussion boards by forum moderator "Frank I." assured developers that the company was looking into the problem. "We are currently investigating the issue. We have gotten the resources necessary to clear this issue," he wrote. He did not give a time table for when the problem would be solved.

According to David Ciccarelli, the CEO of Voices.com, who alerted us to the outage, the timing could not be worse. "This serious[ly] effects our calendar year-end numbers as I'm sure it does many other businesses that utilize PayPal for managing website subscription payments," he told us.

A serious outage also afflicted the company in October 2004.

One thing all of these outages have so far had in common: they haven't done too much to hurt PayPal's business or let competitors gain some market share. Even now that seems unlikely. PayPal's two biggest competitors are Google, whose Checkout service doesn't support recurring subscriptions and Amazon, whose Flexible Payment Service does offer subscription functionality but is in limited beta and not available to everyone. Other than PayPal, the only other option for most sellers is going with an often costly full merchant account.

At the risk of jinxing things - I think it's pretty clear that there's a historic shift underway between activities we used to engage in offline and things we now do online. It's no surprise, for example, that CD sales were down 20% this US holiday season while online shopping was up 19%. That's how it works, right? People are moving from one marketplace to another, more virtual one.

Another dataset released this weekend, however, paints a more complex picture. According to the newest study from the Pew Internet and American Life Center - the youngest, most affluent and most internet-connected adults in the US are also the most likely to visit a physical library. It wasn't that way just 10 years ago. How many other legacy industries can you think of today that can say their strongest growth is among young, affluent, power-internet users? Something is going very right in library land. The music business ought to pay close attention to what's going on there.

As many librarians (and perhaps the most savvy people in the music business) can tell you, the internet does not have to replace offline activities one-to-one, as a zero-sum game. Both planes, if you will, can provide essential value ads to each other - and thus "make the pie higher," as they say.

The Pew study found that 62 percent of Americans aged 18-30 are active library users, the percentage drops sharply at age 50 and falls to 32 percent of those 72 and up. Library use is highest, the study found, among young people who have internet access at home. Just a handful of years ago it was widely believed that home internet access would be the death of the public library.

CNN's coverage of the study is excellent and includes the following:

"It was truly surprising in this survey to find the youngest adults are the heaviest library users," [Pew director Lee] Rainie said. "The notion has taken hold in our culture that these wired-up, heavily gadgeted young folks are swimming in a sea of information and don't need to go to places where information is."

Leigh Estabrook, a retired professor of information science and sociology at the University of Illinois, said young adults used to finding information online are likely to crave even more and realize they need to turn to libraries to get it.

Rainie added that young adults are the ones likely to have visited libraries as teens and seen their transformation into information hubs, with computers and databases alongside stacks of printed books.

Earlier this month we ran a post here titled Sexy Librarians of the Future Will Help You Upload Your Videos to YouTube. In that post we discussed Jon Udell's theory that librarians of the future could play a key roll in facilitating the rise of User Generated Content online.

Whether that vision is truly futuristic or something many librarians are already doing, libraries are clearly offering the kind of added value that bookstores, mom-n-pop stores and other struggling markets are trying to use to survive the coming of the internet. Events and human customer service are two things that all of these institutions can offer.

Things that libraries are unique in offering, though, include well organized information, direct access to people with unusually strong internet skills (your librarian can probably Google circles around you, for example) and an oasis of braininess in an increasingly insipid culture of nihilism.

It's been years since I was a mini-librarian (GovDocs reference as work study!) so I won't pretend to be up on the state of the art - but there are plenty of Library 2.0 blogs online to get a taste of the field.

It is clear, however, that the library still has a lot to teach us about thriving in this digital era. Traditional institutions and the Internet can have symbiotic relationships, each making the other stronger and more important than ever.

Img credit: The Guitar Heroes of the American Library Association's Midwinter 2007 conference. CC by Flickr user Libraryman. Note: I feel funny about the focus on "affluent young people" in this post as yuppie kids in the library isn't the goal, thank goodness, but I'm drawing a comparison with the private sector. Note the limitations of the analogy.

Filed under: Transportation

Anyone can claim to be a friend of the environment while proudly jaunting about in a sporty Tesla, so what really separates the hardcore greens from the Hollywood posers is the willingness to shell out nearly twenty-five grand for a no-frills, no hype (and no doors?) solar-powered runabout. It must be this dedicated demographic that a team of builders and racers from Taiwan's National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences are targeting with the vehicle you see above, which is based on their successful design that ranked second of fifty cars in the latest Australian World Solar Challenge. Unlike their single-passenger, 145kph (90mph) race car, however, the multi-seat commercial ride is speculated to max out at around 70kph (43mph); fine for short city commutes, but not really practical for road trips (and with the three-hour battery, forget about cruising around much at night). Still, those ready to fork over an estimated 800,000 New Taiwanese Dollars ($24,617) for a vehicle that only a short-sighted mother could love should be able to order one as early as next year -- probably not tomorrow, though.

[Via The Raw Feed]

 

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From TechCrunch UK:

Israeli search technology start-up Hooja has raised $1.5 million from some well known-investors, including Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, and an early investor in Facebook. Hooja, currently in stealth mode, is said to be developing a technology that enables content providers to access personal and social information about users, and the tech is related to text messaging. Thiel has also backed Friendster, LinkedIn and Slide, and manages the hedge fund Clarium Capital.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Mozilla has added live chat to its support page, with a cute little foxy logo. Staffed by a few volunteers, the live support chat is only available for a few hours each day, but it’s a great start.

Mozilla has made some pretty significant strides in the past couple of years, and as the company behind the Firefox browser gains market share and looks to become more mainstream, it’s important to provide easy access support options for a wide range of users. This is especially important for Mozilla’s crossing the chasm, as the majority of mainstream users will need some support of several kinds, at one point or another. If the beta testing for this live support chat goes well, Mozilla will be expanding it in the future.

Will a simple live chat actually help Mozilla take things to another level? It won’t be a deal breaker by any means. Live chat is something that several companies now offer online, from those companies that introduce new web-based concepts, to those that merely have a vested interest in their customer service offerings. But this move does show Mozilla’s aim to appeal to a more mainstream user, so incorporating more tactics such as this will be an ever-present task on Mozilla’s “to-do” list. Another way in which Mozilla has made things easier for its users is browser skin custom tools for designers to utilize for their own purposes.

[via download squad]

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In August, a month after eBay launch their Craigslist competitor Kijiji in the US, we weren't impressed. "Kijiji has a hard to pronounce/spell name, an uninviting splash page, and a month later major metros like New York and San Francisco (confusingly labeled as "Bay Area") have just a handful of listings," we wrote at then. Rather, we thought Gumtree, a more straight Craigslist clone that was at the time the most popular classifieds site in Britain, would be more successful when eBay brought it stateside. At year's end, it looks like we backed the wrong horse.

eBay's multi-pronged classifieds strategy also includes Loquo and Marktplaats. But it is Kijiji that has provided most of the growth for eBay's classifieds unit, which saw year over year revenue jump by 105% in 2007.

Currently, Kijiji has about 250,000 ads on the site -- compared to Craigslist, whose users post about 30 million new ads each month, that doesn't seem like many (to be fair, the Craigslist number includes international posts). But comparing stats with Craigslist will make everything Kijiji does look trivial, and that may not be the case.

A fight between eBay and Craigslist may look like David vs. Goliath (where Goliath is confusingly playing the part of David), but as eBay spokesman Jose Malbo told the New York Times in August, eBay believes that classifieds "is a very diverse market that clearly wants more choice." And as more local ad spending moves online and out of newspapers (local newspaper ad spending was down 8% in the first half of 2007), there appears to be a growing market that eBay can take a chunk of. Unlike Craigslist, eBay's classifieds site is built with a single goal in mind: making money.

According to Nielsen, Kijiji US is getting about 1.8 million visitors -- that's still well shy of the 20 million that Craigslist gets, but significant because no other small player has yet cracked the 1 million mark (Nielsen). That includes efforts from large companies like Microsoft, whose LiveExpo service has failed to capture much market share.

eBay plans to staff up Kijiji over the next year, and launch more localized versions of the site, like the Spanish language one it already launched in Miami. "We’ve had half a person dedicated to the U.S. launch," Kijiji VP and GM Jacob Aqraou told the New York Times. "Next year, we’ll fully be up to the level of resources we should be putting against this."

Filed under: Cellphones

It probably doesn't come as much of a shock to you that plenty of texting goes down midnight-ish tonight, and naturally the carriers are gearing up for just such an onslaught. Palm isn't so optimistic about the proceedings: according to a study it commissioned in the UK with lpsos MORI, 70% of people who send messages at midnight experience a delay in delivery, with places like London experience 77% delays, and 23% of Britons waiting over six hours for their text messages to arrive. Palm suggests an IM or email might be in order, and smartphone users will have better luck getting their messages delivered over the comparably unclogged data networks. Verizon seems more excited about the prospect, expecting the 284 million text messages sent last year on its network between 12pm New Years Eve and 4am New Years Day to rise to 300 million. Telstra expects to process more than 53 million messages across Australia, and will have a "small army" of techs on hand to monitor network performance. Canadians are expected to send 50 million texts this year, according to Virgin Mobile Canada, with the average canadian sending two text messages each -- double that of last year. However and wherever you party, stay safe out there -- friends don't let friends drink and text their estranged exes.

Read - Palm study warns of delays
Read - Verizon predicts 300 million
Read - Canada doubles in texts
Read - Telstra's small army in Australia

 

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Big Daddy is rounding up the year with, what else, lists documenting the most popular articles, heavy hitting stories and those who entered the dreaded deadpool in the past year. Whether you’re into the whole Web 2.0 craze or not, it may be a good idea just to peruse the headlines to see if anything tickles your fancy and see what’s actually going on in the World Wide Web.

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If you’ve been putting donating an OLPC, today is your last day to participate in the Give One Get One program. So after today, if you buy one, you only get one.

It’ll set you back $399, but it’s for a good cause and you’ll get one for yourself, so yay.

OLPC

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Filed under: Cellphones

 

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