Gbuy, PayPal and (Romania) Internet Fraud

Wall Street Journal reports that the long awaited competition for Paypal is going live this week. As a bonus, Google is offering mail-in rebate incentives to help sway users to using their electronic-payment system. Google plans to charge merchants a 2.2% commission on a sale, but is offering discounts to those who participate in its AdWords program.

I am wondering if the service will be available any time soon in Romania or if it will pressure PayPal to come around.

This considering the important drop (and the year to year progress) Romania had in the top of international online fraud, accodring to the IC3 report. Meanwhile, during the last 5 years the number of internet users in Romania increased by more than 5 times from less 1 million in 2001 to more than 5 million last year.

Year Place % of global onlne fraud
2001 4 0.9%
2002 5 1.7%
2003 6 1.5%
2004 7 0.92
2005 9 0.7%

The most internet fraudulent country remains US with more than 70% of online fraudulent actions.

Posted on June 21, 2006

WikiMapia

Collaboration + tagging + Google Maps = one of the most interesting Google maps applications so far. People are basically tagging places around the world on GMaps.
wikmaps

Here is the link for Bucharest.

Posted on June 4, 2006

Ask/Bloglines Blog Search

Even though I am still considering leaving Bloglines as my readers of choice (the reasons are not the subject of this post, but are related with the fact that I feel it lacks a lot of features available now around the web) I can’t stop not noticing their new blog search, with the great fact that they are searching what people subscribe to which should mean that we’ll get less spammy results.

Since blogging and feeds tend to be more associated with individuals rather than organizations, Ask has also implemented a sophisticated name-recognition capability. Search for a name, and for active bloggers you see links to posts by and posts about the person. Another feature surfaces “top feeds” based on a combination of relevance to your query and popularity of blogs that match your query.

Check it out here: blogsearch.ask.com

Posted on June 1, 2006

Get Yourself (and Your Computer) World Cup Ready

World Cup is coming, and even if Romania is not there, again, I am preparing for it, so here is an interesting list of resources:

FIFA World Cup Official Website, in partnership with Yahoo!, for the second time (if I’m not wrong) is the place to start and to explore all official information for the tournament, games, the venues, etc etc.

WC Offficial Song – This time, the official song for the World Cup, “Time of our lives,” will be in charge of the opera-pop band Il Divo (who have mixed the bel canto and pop music), and six-time-Grammy-winner Tony Braxton.

World Cup Blog – We live in the 21st century so such an event couldn’t exist without several blogs around it. The worldcupblog.org seems to be the most complex one, and is dedicated to covering all aspects of the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The site features 32 country-specific blogs, a referees blog and a blog covering general tournament news. Worth a mention the BBC WC blog and the NYTimes WC Blog.

World Cup Wallpapers – getting to your computer now, here is a list of great WC themed wallpapers for your desktop.

Microsoft’s Soccer Scoreboard – even though there are two words I kinda hate in this title (and scoreboard is not one of them 😉 ) this fun program allows you to access all the latest tournament news and information with the click of a button! Live game data allow you to monitor your favorite teams progress in real-time.

World Cup Firefox Extension – for those who, like me, are lazier, they can get all the information and results straight in their favorite browser.(the page is in german, but I have no doubt you’ll manage to install the extension)

Technorati Tags: FIFA World Cup, Germany 2006, fifa, football