PayPal launches small-business loan program

PayPal is getting into the increasingly crowded small-business loan market. The eBay-owned online and mobile payment service this week announced PayPal Working Capital, a loan program that will initially serve qualified existing PayPal merchant customers.

PayPal won’t actually lend the money—its initial banking partner is WebBank. But borrowers aren’t saddled with fixed monthly payments or late fees: Rather, they repay the loan and a pre-set loan fee out of sales revenues processed by PayPal.

The cost of the loan depends on the amount borrowed (generally, up to 8 percent of total annual sales processed by PayPal in the last year), the percentage of sales receipts dedicated to paying the loan (between 10 percent and 30 percent), and the merchant’s PayPal track record.

The higher the percentage of sales the merchant is willing to allocate to paying back the loan, the lower the overall fee. In PayPal’s published example, for a business with $100,000 in annual sales that borrows the maximum, $8,000, the loan fee varies from $947 if the business opts to dedicate 10 percent of sales receipts to paying down the loan, to $281 for a business that dedicates 30 percent of its sales receipts to paying back the loan.

No credit check is involved, so the merchant’s credit rating isn’t adversely affected by the loan. PayPal says loan application approval can take as little as five minutes. PayPal wouldn’t say how many merchants are actually eligible for the initial program, which runs through the end of the year.

PayPal will continue to collect its usual transaction fees from participating merchants, who must continue to use the service to process payments until the loan is paid off. PayPal will calculate the loan payment at the end of each business day, and withdraw the funds the following day.

There is some fine print. Merchants cannot activate PayPal’s Autosweep feature (which transfers receipts electronically to a bank account every day) while they are paying back a loan. While they can still manually transfer funds, if the account balance falls below the amount a merchant has committed to repay the loan, PayPal will simply withdraw any new receipts as so-called catch-up payments.

For more information, visit the PayPal Working Capital website.

Contributing Editor Yardena (Denny) Arar is a San Francisco-based freelance writer, avid online shopper, media junkie, consummate foodie, and proud possessor of a private pilot's license.
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Japan sends talking robot into space as part of program to help lonely people

Kirobo, a talking robot that also recognizes faces, was launched Sunday on a cargo transfer vehicle and will reach the International Space Station in six days.

The robot is part of a program that aims to provide companionship using such devices to people living alone including the elderly.

Kirobo boarded the Kounotori 4 cargo transfer vehicle launched from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Tanegashima Space Center atop an H-IIB launch vehicle on Sunday morning, the Kibo Robot Project, which counts Toyota and Robo Garage as two of the project partners, said on its website.

The black and white robot, with red boots, is a little over 13-inches (34 centimeters) tall, and combines speech, voice and face recognition and other communications functions. Its first task will be to communicate with Koichi Wakata, a Japanese astronaut who joins the robot in November, according to reports. Backup crew member Mirata, who stays back in Japan, has similar capabilities.

"The Kibo robot has a special mission: To help solve the problems brought about by a society that has become more individualized and less communicative," the project wrote on its website.

Japanese-speaking Kirobo will spend 18 months on the ISS, talking to Wakata.

The project earlier asked people to suggest names for both the robots, and got 2,452 entries from 1,226 people.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service.
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The Guardian: NSA’s XKeyscore program has nearly limitless access to all Internet activity

The Guardian has detailed new revelations from NSA-leaker Edward Snowden about a program known as XKeyscore that has been described as the agency’s “widest-ranging” tool for online data collection.

PowerPoint training materials obtained by The Guardian show how analysts could use the system to mine sprawling agency databases consisting of a vast reservoir of data. At least 41 billion records were collected and stored in a single 30-day period in 2012, according to the report, which also says XKeyscore collects more than 20 terabytes of information daily, including emails, chats, social media interactions, and even browsing histories—all in real-time.

www.guardian.co.ukSearching emails was as easy as filling in a search field.

For example, with little more than an email address, the agency would be able to search “every email address seen in a session by both username and domain,” “every phone number seen in a session (eg address book entries or signature block)”, and “the webmail and chat activity to include username, buddy list, machine specific cookies etc.”

The PowerPoint documents also reveal that agents would have the ability to search through any individual’s email as long as they had an address. This would include “searches within bodies of emails, webpages and documents,” including “To, From, CC, BCC lines” and even the “Contact Us” pages on websites.

This adds validity to Snowden’s often disregarded claim that “I, sitting at my desk could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.”

www.guardian.co.ukA simple search field for finding Facebook communicaitons.

Beyond email, the technology would give the NSA the ability to rummage through social media activity. For example, authorities would have the ability to monitor Facebook chats by simply searching a Facebook user name and a date range into a simple search screen.

US authorities claim that no warrant is needed to intercept communications of non-US Citizens or if the communication is between an American and a foreign target. However, according to the report, analysts had—in the least—the technological ability to access any information from US persons, provided they had some identifying information such as an email or IP address without prior authorization.

Snowden’s leaks were hardly the first allegations of mass electronic surveillance, however the Prism leaks, along with these latest allegations, show how monitoring of the virutal world are far more extensive than most people could possibly imagine.

Evan lives in Brooklyn, NY and enjoys writing about what future may hold and taking long romantic walks on the beach.
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SAP expands partner program for application development

SAP has broadened its partner program for companies that want to develop applications using its technology and then sell them through the SAP online store.

While SAP already had programs aimed at mobile application development and its HANA Cloud service, the expanded offering brings in more technologies and also accommodates partners who want to build products that run on-premises, according to Monday’s announcement.

Partners will also be able to bundle and sell runtime licenses for SAP platform software with any applications they build, “so you can join the program once and then decide on your application scope, architecture, business model and routes to market,” according to an FAQ document. This approach also gives partners the ability “to act as ‘one face to the customer,’” SAP said.

SAP will charge partners royalties for the platform products “as a percentage of the net revenue of your packaged application (based on license list price and considering standard discounts such as volume discounts),” according to the FAQ.

Admission to the program requires a “low annual fee,” which gives partners access to their choice of “innovation packs” centered on various SAP products.

SAP Technologies covered by the expanded program include HANA, HANA Cloud, mobile platform, NetWeaver and ABAP, Sybase ASE, Sybase IQ and Sybase SQL Anywhere.

The program features a variety of partner onboarding services, ongoing training and support, and ultimately product review and certification services.

Partners can get their products qualified for the SAP store through an application review at no additional charge. Integration certifications are available for a fee. SAP charges 15 percent of revenue for applications sold through its store, compared to 30 percent for Apple’s iTunes store.

However, iTunes has a far higher profile than SAP’s store, as one question in the FAQ document alluded to. “SAP will drive demand to the SAP Store and will develop it further,” the FAQ states.

One-year, limited access “exploration memberships” for the expanded partner program are available for those who want to try before they buy, according to SAP.

The announcement is “a welcome evolution of partner development onboarding,” said Jon Reed, an independent analyst who closely tracks SAP, via email. “It’s more integrated, and increasingly clear on pricing.”

“Basically SAP has consolidated and simplified the ability for partners to develop apps,” Reed added. “Even though the marketplace for those apps is not as well-established or conceived, SAP clearly needs a real apps ecosystem around its products and partners need this kind of simplified process.”

Still, “it’s a welcome step but there is still a lot to prove in terms of partners building apps that are truly impactful for customers,” he said.

In addition, “a big missing piece from what i can see is connecting this partner program to individual developers (such as highly skilled independents),” Reed said. “That path is clear inside SAP but it doesn’t seem clear from the outside.”

SAP’s announcement didn’t particularly emphasize one technology more than another, even though HANA has emerged as the focal point for all internal development efforts.

It has launched a separate program for HANA aimed at getting startup companies to build products on the platform, and says to date that more than 500 have joined.

Also Monday, SAP announced that three more software vendors—PROS, AlertEnterprise and Clockwork—have become HANA OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partners and will embed the technology in their products.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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Yale grad's 'Prism' program turns text metadata into wavy art

What if the NSA took your text message metadata and made a flowing, colorful diagram with a timeline?

The U.S. spy agency -- probably -- doesn't do that. But a 22-year-old Yale graduate, Bay Gross, was actually inspired by the U.S. government's Prism surveillance program revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

Gross, who just started working at Google in New York on Monday, created an application he describes as "part data, part art" that analyzes a person's own SMS messages and lays them out in a rainbow wave. Appropriately, he named it "Prism."

Prism, which works on Mac OS, draws the SMS metadata from the user's own unencrypted backups within iTunes. It pulls who was texted and when and plots the data in a "Streamgraph," a type of stacked graph developed by Lee Byron, who is an interactive information designer with Facebook.

Byron, who was a graphics intern with the New York Times in 2008, developed a Streamgraph for the newspaper that displayed box office revenues for films. The graphic drew praise and criticism due to its unorthodox approach.

Streamgraphs emphasize the "legibility of individual layers, arranging the layers in a distinctively organic form," according to an academic paper authored by Byron and Martin Wattenberg.

Gross says from an analytical view the Streamgraph is "kind of useless." The y-axis, for example, which appears to represent volume of texts to a recipient, is "completely made up."

But Prism does enable a more emotive or romantic view of data. The x-axis, which represents time, can show the degree to which some relationships are zero sum or even seasonal, Gross said. You can see, for example, how some texting relationships start fast and furious but atrophy to a meager small stream.

The application doesn't show the content of the messages. Gross has also put in a feature where the graphs created by Prism can be exported but minus people's names. The graph can be manipulated using a variety of parameters, such as by date, popularity and frequency of contact.

Prism is a desktop application for Mac. Apple lets people encrypt their iPhone backups on a computer, but Prism needs access to an unencrypted backup. All of the processing is done on a person's computer, and nothing is sent to a remote server, Gross said.

Apple rejected Prism from inclusion in its App Store, but Gross said that's due to the company's strict guidelines for its store. However, Prism is a certified developer application.

Prism is free as part of its launch, but will eventually cost US$0.99.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk

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