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ETNews of Korea reports on Shinhan Card rolling out Korea’s first ever USB type credit card on Thursday, December 27.

ETNews further writes, “The USB credit card provides the online and contactless payment function and works the post-paid transportation card as well. The built-in IC chip includes the public authorization and the internet credit payment programs.

During the online payment, users do not need to insert the credit card number. Rather, they can pay by connecting the USB to the slot. At the franchise stores with the IC card reader, it enables the no-touch payment.

The card also supports the information inquiry and the automatic log-in service using the public authorization and the built-in internet payment programs. However, it is limited for users to delete or save data so that the USB itself cannot be used as a portable storage device.” More at ETNews.

San Jose, Calif — Dec 19, `07 - eBay today released the following statement regarding its District Court victory in the Netcraft vs eBay and PayPal patent infringement case.

On December 18, 2007, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin entered judgment, granting eBay’s and PayPal’s motion for summary judgment of non-infringement on both of the patents that Netcraft asserted against eBay and PayPal.

“We are pleased by the Court’s well-reasoned ruling in this case. We will continue to protect the interests of our global community of users and the businesses who rely on eBay’s platforms to make a living.”

In May 2007, Netcraft brought suit against eBay and PayPal and contended that PayPal’s payment services infringe two of Netcraft’s patents titled “Internet Billing Method.” The Court ruled that all of the patents in question require “providing customers with internet access” and because eBay and PayPal do not provide customers with internet access, the two companies do not infringe Netcraft’s patents.

Waterloo, Belgium and Purchase, NY — Dec 19, `07 — MasterCard Europe said that it will appeal to the European Court of First Instance today’s decision by the European Commission regarding MasterCard Europe’s default cross-border interchange fees.

The Commission’s Order requires the company, among other things, to “repeal [its] Intra-EEA fallback interchange fees, as well as [its] SEPA/Intra-Eurozone interchange fees” within six months. The Order applies only to “interchange fees for MasterCard branded consumer credit and charge cards and for MasterCard or Maestro branded debit cards”.

MasterCard Europe believes that it has strong grounds for its appeal. While it will comply with the Commission’s Order, the company said that it is prepared to take action so that its payment products remain competitive and continue to benefit the millions of European cardholders who use and merchants that accept MasterCard and Maestro cards.

MasterCard Europe said its decision to appeal is based on its firm conviction that market forces, not regulation, should drive key decisions such as the setting of interchange fees and retailers’ choices over which forms of payment to accept. More at MasterCard.

Brussels — Dec 19, `07 –The European Commission has decided that MasterCard’s Multilateral Interchange Fees (MIF) for cross-border payment card transactions with MasterCard and Maestro branded debit and consumer credit cards in the European Economic Area (EEA) violate EC Treaty rules on restrictive business practices (Article 81).

The Commission concluded that MasterCard’s MIF, a charge levied on each payment at a retail outlet when the payment is processed, inflated the cost of card acceptance by retailers without leading to proven efficiencies.

MasterCard has six months to comply with the Commission’s order to withdraw the fees. If MasterCard fails to comply, the Commission may impose daily penalty payments of 3.5% of its daily global turnover in the preceding business year.

MIF are not illegal as such. However, a MIF in an open payment card scheme such as MasterCard’s is only compatible with EU competition rules if it contributes to technical and economic progress and benefits consumers. In the EU, over 23 billion payments, exceeding a value of €1350 billion, are made every year with payment cards.

Why does MasterCard’s MIF restrict competition under EC Treaty rules on restrictive business practices (Article 81 (1))?
MasterCard’s MIF is a mechanism that restricts price competition between acquiring banks by artificially inflating the basis on which these banks set their charges to merchants. A MIF effectively determines a floor under the merchant service charge and merchants are unable to negotiate a price below it. This can considerably inflate the costs of payment card usage at merchant outlets to the detriment of merchants and their customers. For instance, the Commission estimates that MasterCard’s MIF accounted for more than 70% of the merchant service charges for credit cards in Belgium (2002) and for approximately 60% of these charges in Italy (2003).

If MasterCard operated without a MIF, merchants would pay lower prices for accepting cards and, as a consequence, their customers should also incur lower costs for shopping at a merchant’s.

Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said: “Multilateral interchange fee agreements such as MasterCard’s inflate the cost of card acceptance by retailers. Consumers foot the bill, as they risk paying twice for payment cards: once through annual fees to their bank and a second time through inflated retail prices paid not only by card users but also by customers paying cash. The Commission will accept these fees only where they are clearly fostering innovation to the benefit of all users.”

More at the European Commission here and here.

Part shopper, part geek, all penny-wise. All of us here at deal locker really truely love the rush of getting a great deal. Even more we love to help our friends do the same. Deal Locker is in its infancy, but is focused on building a suite of tools designed to help you and your friends save money. Says DealLocker.com.

Donna Fuscaldo of Fox Business writes about an entrepreneur turning his frustrations with Internet coupons into a business plan for a new Web site.

His plan turned into DealLocker.com, where users are told to type in a merchants’ name to find all the coupons associated with that retailer. You can also browse through different categories, giving you potentially more opportunities to save, the site boasts.

“The idea behind the Web site is a really easy place to find coupons to stores,’’ said Jonathan Lieberman, founder and chief executive of deallocker.com.

Deallocker.com was born out of Lieberman’s aggravation sparked by Internet coupons. Lieberman, a former Internet marketer, would spend hours paging through websites trying to find those ever elusive coupons.

“You’d get to that checkout page and the empty coupon box would mock you,’’ said Lieberman. “I was so frustrated that I never had that secret code.”

DealLocker.com, which went live in August, currently has 2,500 participating merchants. But consumers are encouraged to post any coupons they find on their own on the Web. All told, the website boasts about 5,000 stores with roughly 20,000 coupons being offered. Lieberman said the company sees hundreds of thousands of visitors each month. More at FoxBusiness.

San Jose, Calif — Dec 12, ‘07 — eBay released the following statement in response to the December 11, 2007 District Court ruling in the MercExchange v. eBay case.

“We are disappointed with the court’s order and we plan to appeal it. In its ruling, the court concluded that it did not have the legal right to consider the merits of our arguments concerning the ‘265 patent, but rather was required to reject our motions based on the procedural posture of the case. We intend to appeal the Court’s ruling on the procedural issues and remain confident that after the appeal, the Court will consider our arguments on their merits.

“Additionally, our motion for summary judgment that our 2003 design-around was effective and there is no ongoing infringement of the ‘265 patent, and that no further damages are due, also remains pending before the court.

“We remain pleased with other developments in this ongoing case, including the decision by the United States Court of Appeals to invalidate another patent in this case; the May 2006 unanimous Supreme Court decision in eBay’s favor on MercExchange’s request for an injunction; and the District Court’s subsequent affirmation in September 2007 that no injunction is called for. We look forward to the opportunity to appeal yesterday’s District Court ruling.”

Tuesday’s ruling by Judge Jerome Friedman stems from a jury’s 2003 verdict finding eBay and eBay subsidiary Half.com liable for $35 million for intentionally infringing two MercExchange patents. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit later reduced the award to $25.5 million.

Friedman in July denied eBay’s request to stay proceedings on one of the patents, governing eBay’s so-called “Buy It Now” feature that allows users to buy an item outright at a given price without bidding for it.

Friedman said in July the US Supreme Court’s 2006 ruling sending the case back to the trial court for further action had no bearing on the jury’s 2003 verdict. More at eBay.

The so-called “Gift Order Patent” has been revoked by the EPO, On Dec 07, ‘07, in an opposition proceeding today after a hearing involving three opposing parties and the patent proprietor, Amazon. The patent relates to a method for purchasing goods over the Internet to be sent as gifts.

The contested patent is European Patent EP 0 927 945, granted to Amazon Inc. on 23 April 2003. This patent relates to an invention in the field of computer-implemented inventions (CII). It specifies a method by which a person can purchase a product as a gift and have it shipped based on the e-mail address of the recipient. Based on this e-mail address, the system will then contact the recipient to obtain a valid postal address for shipping. This patent is not to be confused with the “One-Click” patent application, which was withdrawn after the first EPO examination and never granted in Europe.

The parties who have lodged opposition against the patent – all of whom were represented at the hearing – are Fleurop Interflora Businesses and two non-government organisations in the IT field, namely the German Society of Information Sciences, and the Foundation for Free Information Infrastructure (FFII).

One of the opposition’s main arguments against the patent – among others – was that it fell short of meeting the criteria of providing an “inventive step”, as defined in Article 56 of the European Patent Convention (EPC). On these grounds, the three opposing parties asked for the patent to be revoked.

The European Patent Office as an intergovernmental executive institution is not itself a party to this case. The EPO’s Opposition Division acts as an independent arbiter and issues rulings in conformity with the European Patent Convention and the applicable international and European law. More at EPO.

- Retail Store Operations Will Wind-Down, Offering Consumers Attractive Holiday Bargains on Computer and Electronics Products

DALLAS, Dec 07, ‘07 /PRNewswire/ — CompUSA today announced that it has been acquired by an affiliate of Gordon Brothers Group, LLC, a global advisory, restructuring and investment firm specializing in retail, consumer products, real estate and industrial sectors. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Gordon Brothers Group will initiate an orderly wind-down of CompUSA’s retail store operations and is engaged in discussions with various parties regarding the sale of certain assets. CompUSA’s 103 retail stores will remain open and staffed during the holiday season, and will offer consumers attractive bargains on computer and electronic products as part of store closing sales.

Active discussions are under way to sell select stores in key markets as well as the company’s highly-regarded technical services business,
CompUSA TechPro, and its productive Internet sales operation, CompUSA.com. CompUSA TechPro and CompUSA.com will be operated by the company as going concerns until any sale transactions are closed.

CompUSA will be run by Bill Weinstein, a Principal at Gordon Brothers Group, acting as Interim President, and by Stephen Gray, Managing Partner at restructuring firm CRG Partners, who will serve as Chief Restructuring Officer. Current CEO Roman Ross will continue to serve the company in an executive advisory capacity during the transition period.

DJM Realty, a Gordon Brothers Group company that specializes in real estate disposition and valuations, will assist in assessing the leases for
CompUSA’s store locations. More at PRNewsWire.

Nov 27, ‘07 — Naomi Kim of Reuters bring us the Brookstone story, which adds 3rd dimension to the online shopping.

“Consumers looking to avoid crowded malls and the tedium of online shopping can now shop in a virtual 3-dimensional store.

Specialty retailer Brookstone Inc. opened the virtual doors to its 3-dimensional store, which combines a Second Life-like visual experience with real merchandise customers can buy.

The virtual store replicates the look and layout of a real store. Customers can move through the aisles and browse and zoom on products using a mouse and keyboard. Detailed information is available by stopping in front of an item.

“We think it really appeals to a younger audience for us, a demographic probably 25 to 40… because of the almost gaming nature of it,” said Sweeney. Brookstone.com will still offer its wares in the conventional way, but offers the 3-D store as an alternative”. More at Reuters.

Brookstone 3D Online Store (Warning: On the next screen, you have to install -never heard before- Kinset shopping browser in order to browse the 3D store).

Related Story: EveryScape Will Show You the Real World, Online!

Taipei, Taiwan — Nov 26, ‘07 –Jimmy Hsu of DigiTimes reports on Samsung Electronics, in a bid to promote sales of its digital cameras at the annual IT Month fair to take place in Taipei in early December, offering a 4GB SD memory card as a gift along with the sale of Samsung digital cameras, citing retail channels in the Taiwan market.

He further writes, “Price competition that has been ongoing for up to two years in the Taiwan market has reduced sales margins for digital cameras to a low level of $15.5-24.7 (NT$500-800), and vendors have started to opt for offering gifts instead of further price cuts, the sources indicated.

Memory cards are the most common promotional gifts offered alongside digital cameras, usually a 1GB SD card for an entry-level model and a 2GB SD card for a mid-range or high-end model, the sources noted. However, Samsung will take the initiative in offering 4GB SD cards and it is uncertain whether main competitors, including Canon, Sony, Panasonic, Nikon and Casio, will follow suit, the sources pointed out.” More at DigiTimes.

Helsinki, Finland - Fancy a dose of culture in the Finnish city of Oulu? All you need is a mobile phone. Says Reuters.

Get theatre tickets digitally, download a smart video trailer of how the play was directed, order and pay for snacks for the interval and, after a culture-packed night, order a taxi home — all by just swiping a cellphone over smart tags placed on the menus or around the foyer of the theatre.

The Oulu City Theatre in northern Finland, 373 miles (600 kilometers) north of Helsinki, says it is the world’s first cultural institution to use the hippest handset technology, expected to turn mobile phones into wallets.

NFC (near-field communication) technology is activated by waving phones over wireless readers, or smart tags, and is widely used in public transport access cards.

The theatre is running a pilot, involving technology from Finnish mobile phone-maker Nokia and telecommunications operator TeliaSonera, until the year-end and will extend its usage more widely if it proves successful. More at Reuters.

Nov 24, ‘07 — The lure of bargains trumped economic concerns at the start of the holiday shopping season as retailers logged sales that were significantly stronger than a year ago, a customer traffic counter said on Saturday.

According to ShopperTrak RCT Corp., which tracks sales at more than 50,000 retail outlets, total sales rose 8.3 percent to about $10.3 billion on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, compared with $9.5 billion on the same day a year ago. ShopperTrak had expected an increase of no more than 4 percent to 5 percent.

“This is a really strong number. … You can’t have a good season unless it starts well,” said Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak, citing strength across all regions. “It’s very encouraging. When you look at September and October, shoppers weren’t in the stores.”

The upbeat reports were encouraging since merchants have been struggling with anemic sales in recent months, as shoppers, particularly in the middle and lower-income brackets, were becoming more frugal amid higher gas and food prices and an escalating credit crunch.

In an apparent sign of desperation, the nation’s stores ushered in the official start of the holiday shopping season on Friday with expanded hours, including midnight openings, and a blitz of early morning specials that were more generous than a year ago. J.C. Penney and Kohl’s Corp. opened at 4 a.m., an hour earlier than a year ago.

The strategy appears to have worked, as shoppers jammed stores in record numbers for early morning deals on Friday. Martin noted that judging by the strong figures on Friday, stores were able to sustain strong sales throughout the day. He said he’s counting on strong traffic throughout the weekend as many stores, including Macy’s Inc., are continuing with special deals.

While Black Friday — so named because it was traditionally when the surge of shopping made stores profitable — starts holiday shopping, it is not considered a bellwether for the season. However, merchants see Black Friday as setting an important tone to the overall season: What consumers see that day influences where they will shop for the rest of the year.

An increase in online shopping has somewhat defused the seasonal predictions based on Black Friday turnout to stores. The convenience of online shopping has caused an increase in shopping on Thanksgiving Day itself.

Shoppers are browsing and researching more on Friday, but buying more on the Monday following Thanksgiving, or “Cyber Monday,” eBay said in a statement.

NEW YORK & MINNEAPOLIS –BUSINESS WIRE– Philips Electronics and the Mall of America (MOA) on Nov 21 announced, they have joined forces for a unique marketing activity aimed at simplifying the shopping experience for the millions of visitors expected to visit the Mall of America from now through the Christmas buying period.

The ‘Philips Simplicity Parking Program’ will enable visitors at the MOA to send a text message to a designated number after parking their car, and then receive information on their phone about exactly where they have parked.

This will help the 50 guests who are unable to locate their cars on a normal shopping day at the MOA, and the estimated 300-400 who will ask Mall security or employees for help this Black Friday.

Simplifying the parking process in shopping malls is no easy feat, and this is especially so at the MOA, a location that is 4.2 million square feet and encompasses 520 stores, the nation’s biggest indoor amusement park, and even a walk through aquarium. It’s easy to get disoriented among the MOA’s more than 12,500 onsite parking spaces, especially for the 40% of shoppers to the Mall who are not local residents.

The traditional Black Friday sales will see more than 150,000 people visit the Mall of America on this day alone, a jump of 50% on normal traffic. More than 28 million people live within a day’s drive to the mall.

Atlanta, GA — Nov 15, ‘07 — Half of more than 3,000 retail stores that a wireless security company secretly monitored at major shopping areas in the U.S. and Europe use wireless data systems vulnerable to hacking, the company said Thursday.

The data that stores routinely transmit on wireless networks include credit card and Social Security numbers and other sensitive customer information.

AirDefense Inc., an Atlanta-based maker of security products for wireless data systems, found that about 25 percent of the stores’ 4,748 wireless access points were exchanging data with no encryption at all to foil electronic eavesdroppers.

Another 25 percent were using an outdated encryption method called Wireless Equivalent Privacy (WEP) that is easily cracked by thieves using widely available tools.

The remaining half of the access points — the connections between wireless devices and computer networks — were using newer encryption methods that are considered far harder to crack.

The six-week undercover project — conducted at shopping areas in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, London and Paris — attempted to expose security holes in wireless networks that are increasingly used to transmit data inside stores.

Wireless systems are believed to have been the entry points for recent large-scale data thefts at retailers, including a massive heist at discount retailer TJX Cos.

TJX said in March that at least 45.7 million cards were exposed, although recent court filings by banks suing TJX estimate than 100 million were. Canadian investigators concluded in September that TJX had failed to upgrade its encryption from the older WEP method by the time the eavesdropping began in July 2005.

“The bad guys are going to go for the low-hanging fruit, and that’s the wireless networks,” said Richard Rushing, AirDefense’s chief security officer and manager of the survey project.

The most common data security lapses involved mis-configured access points that open backdoors to data. On several occasions, larger retailers had configured access points to work with WPA but had not switched off WEP, the weakest wireless security protocol. In addition, many retailers use their store name in the SSID, the name assigned by the equipment vendor to the wireless network during installation giving away a retailer’s identity. SSID’s can easily be reconfigured but often times are not. More at AirDefense.

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Oct. 22, 2007–Amazon.com, Inc, today unveiled a new category store, the Amazon All Business Center, aimed at helping entrepreneurs find solutions to fit the needs of their small and medium businesses. The store serves as a one-stop shopping destination to help business owners start, manage and grow their business. In addition to providing customers with quick, easy access to small and medium business products in categories including software, computers, printers, books and office products, business owners will also have the opportunity to explore other services available to them such as Amazon Web Services, Fulfillment by Amazon and Amazon Corporate Accounts.

“Becoming an entrepreneur can be a risky, yet exhilarating experience,” said Greg Hart, vice president of software at Amazon.com. “Our goal with the Amazon All Business Center is to help eliminate some of the guess work when it comes to the information small business owners need to know and the products they need to have in order to succeed. The store is a tool that allows us to reach out to this unique group of customers, and provide them with the best prices, selection and convenience to help make their dreams of owning their own businesses a reality.

Key features of the Amazon All Business Center include:
–  Customers forums, where business owners can ask questions and receive guidance from each other
–  Essential software solutions focused on helping small and medium businesses get started
–  Industry-specific software such as financial services, creative and design, professional services and retail to help entrepreneurs manage their businesses
–  How-to software to help businesses expand
–  Everything needed to outfit an office from furniture, laptops, monitors and printers to notepads and pens
–  Access to Amazon Web Services, Fulfillment by Amazon and Amazon Corporate Accounts
– The Amazon All Business Center is sponsored by Microsoft and Intuit.

More at Amazon