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eBay Now is launching a mobile web version of its service Thursday, as well as expanding the instant delivery service to the San Jose area.

eBay Now allows you to order items from local retailers and have those items delivered to your doorstep in less than an hour. With partners such as Macy’s, Walgreens and Target, you can order anything from an umbrella, to soup and cold medicine.

“We have some good relationships with retailers,“ David Ramadge, eBay’s Head of Local Business Development told _Mashable_. “We’re really trying to partner with them to try and offer a service that they perhaps couldn’t solve on their own.”

The service is available 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday throu…
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Google Glass won’t launch for consumers until later this year, but someone is already advertising a pair on eBay.

In a spelling error-filled post, a seller from Cleveland, Ohio, claims that he or she has been selected as an “early adapter” for the high-tech glasses and will be picking up a pair this week at a Project Glass launch event in New York. The auction started at $1,500 — the going price of Google Glass — but quickly skyrocketed and is now nearly $16,000. The auction ends tomorrow.

“If i am offered a choice, I will choose the color of your choice (see listing picture for variants),” the seller writes. “Project Glass will be shipped with Insurance at my expence, and signature…
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#SuryaRay #Surya Last October, eBay debuted a completely new homepage experience and redesign, marking the company’s biggest homepage in the marketplace’s history. eBay’s feed experience has been in pilot phase for several months, only tested with less than 10 percent of users, and tomorrow eBay is unveiling to new experience to all customers in the U.S. You can access the new homepage here. http://dlvr.it/2yqlwx @suryaray

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Looking for the perfect gift for that Back to the Future nerd in your life? Well, look no further than eBay — if you’ve got $13,000 to spare.

More About: back to the future, ebay, Film http://dlvr.it/2xyXSr @suryaray

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Hoping to start a bidding war, a woman has launched a resume for herself on eBay that warns “Hurry, I will go fast.”

The execution, on behalf of a laboratory technician named Sonya Williams, gives employers until Feb. 4 to make their decision. The offer also promises “no defects or wear and tear” and one-day shipping from Lansing, Mich.

It’s not clear whether Williams’ resume was inspired by that of Philippe Dubost, a web product manager whose Amazon-esque resume we dubbed the “best online resume ever.” However, Williams’ execution pales in comparison if only for the low-quality head shot (what’s up with those red eyes?) and for merely posting her traditional resume (with her contac…
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More About: ebay, Jobs, resumes http://dlvr.it/2sCQzs @suryaray

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Mobile commerce, or “mcommerce,” has had a transformative (and highly publicized) impact on some businesses, including Amazon, eBay and flash sales sites like Gilt. But for the vast majority of retail companies, mobile represents only a neglible fraction of total sales, and it’s likely to stay that way for the next half-decade, according to data from Forrester provided exclusively to _Mashable_.

Sales of physical retail goods and services made on smartphones were $8 billion in the U.S. last year, accounting for 3% of online sales and less than 1% of total retail sales. (Those numbers have been driven up by some outliers, like the aforementioned Amazon and eBay, which have mobile sales in th…
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More About: amazon, ebay, forrester, mcommerce, mobile commerce, retail http://dlvr.it/2pDQDG @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya eBay released significants updates to its iPhone and iPad apps yesterday which it says will “play an important role in eBay Mobile’s year to come.” The ecommerce platform also said that 1.8 million new customers joined eBay through a mobile device in the first three quarters of 2012 and eBay Mobile currently adds an average of 2.4 million listings per week. http://dlvr.it/2mLsSl @suryaray

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An 8-year-old boy just wanted a look at a Mustang for sale on eBay, but almost purchased the $50,000 car on the auction site. To teach him in lesson, his mother pretended he accidentally bought it and it couldn’t be returned. She recorded the incident and posted it to YouTube. In the video, the mom […]

More About: Children, ebay, parenting, YouTube http://dlvr.it/2l6yD5 @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya With the current market fluctuations, some consumers have flocked to bullion  (a.k.a. gold) for safer investments. eBay thinks there’s potential for its marketplace to be a trusted seller of gold, silver and other precious metals and is making a major bet on this vertical as a sales generator via a new exclusive partnership with AMPEX. http://dlvr.it/2gFMnC @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya Will rock bottom natural gas prices help get more fuel cell parks built? Last week FuelCell Energy announced that it has scored a deal to sell its fuel cells to power company Dominion Power, which will build one of the largest fuel cell projects in the U.S. The fuel cell farm, which will be owned by Dominion but will sell power to utility Connecticut Light and Power Company, will use five 2.8 MW fuel cells from FuelCell Energy and will be 14.9 MW in size, or provide enough power for 15,000 homes.

The move is unusual in that there’s few power companies and utilities buying fuel cell power in the U.S. at this point. Fuel cell power tends to be more expensive than centralized power from power plants that use low cost fossil fuels. But the deal between Dominion and the utility is a power purchase agreement over 15 years, so Connecticut Light and Power will buy the power over a decade and a half at a fixed low rate. The fuel cells in the project will also use natural gas as the fuel, and natural gas prices are really low right now.

Perhaps the combo of new financing models and cheap natural gas will lead to an era of more and more fuel cell getting put into the ground. Fuel cell startup Bloom Energy also sells fuel cell energy using power purchase agreements over long periods of time.

The fuel cell farm in Connecticut will be built in the city of Bridgeport on 1.7 acres of land and the first fuel cells will start to be installed in the Summer of 2013. The project is supposed to be operational by the end of 2013. FuelCell Energy says it will generate $125 million with the deal, including $56 million from selling the hardware and $69 million in services, and the project will also contribute to the state’s renewable energy mandates, and provide 160 jobs.

FuelCell Energy also sold a 11.2 MW fuel cell project project to Korean power producer Korean Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO) in Daegu City, South Korea. Bloom Energy has a planned 30 MW fuel cell deal with Delmarva Power.

Internet companies have been as active as utilities, when it comes to using fuel cells to power their data centers. Apple is building a huge fuel cell farm in North Carolina (of which it just doubled the size), eBay is building one, too, and Microsoft is also experimenting with the technology.

_Images courtesy of FuelCell Energy._

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#SuryaRay #Surya Most of the media coverage of Facebook’s latest proposed revisions to its legal agreements with users has focused on one change: the proposed elimination of users’ right to vote. The reality, however, is that this change probably won’t have any practical effect because a vote by users would almost certainly never have been binding on Facebook anyway.

Another change the company has made, despite being more significant, has received relatively little attention. It will add a clause that says it can now share your information with its affiliates. This underscores an important trend: Facebook is now one of several companies that shares your information among its various different services. As the range of services offered by consumer internet heavyweights like Facebook and Google continues to expand, this means that your personal data will end up being used by in ways you could never predict.

The trend towards internal data sharing

* Google’s unified terms of service (introduced on March 1) allows it to combine your data across products like Gmail, Google+ and Google Docs, as well as YouTube, Picasa and scores of other Google properties.
* Microsoft updated its services agreement effective Oct. 19 to allow it to use your content to “provide, protect and improve” all “Microsoft products and services.” The agreement had previously allowed the company to use your data only to provide the particular service in question.
* eBay and PayPal can share your data among all “members of the eBay Inc. corporate family,” which also includes Shopping.com.

Facebook’s ability to use customer data benefits users by allowing for innovation. Its existing Data Use Policy says that you allow the company develop “innovative features and services” by using “the information we receive about you in new ways.” But when its proposed revisions go into effect later this month, its ability to share users’ data will increase further. The following new paragraph will be added:

_We may share information we receive with businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that Facebook is part of, or that become part of that group (often these companies are called affiliates). Likewise, our affiliates may share information with us as well. We and our affiliates may use shared information to help provide, understand, and improve our services and their own services._

The Facebook affiliate that first comes to mind is Instagram. And one of the most immediate applications of this new provision could be that Facebook starts to serve ads on Instagram. But Instagram is just one of many Facebook affiliates. It has numerous subsidiaries, including one it created earlier this year to handle its payments business. And its publicly stated expansion plans mean that it will likely be acquiring other companies, forming new business units, and entering new markets in the near future.

How worried should we be about internal data sharing?

The ability of internet companies that operate in multiple verticals to share your data among their different services has potentially far-reaching consequences. Microsoft could use your Outlook.com email messages or your online Office documents to push targeted ads to you on Bing. eBay could use your shopping history to recommend financial services on PayPal. Facebook could use data you expose by taking Instagram snaps to customize your experience on its web or mobile apps.

Not all of these scenarios may be objectionable to everyone– and in fact, some people may find none of them objectionable. And increased internal sharing can be a good thing not only for the companies themselves but also for users. Being able to tightly integrate our experience across all Google products, for example, offers an efficiency as well as functionality boon. For the service providers, being able to increase the effectiveness of targeted advertising means that they can improve their bottom line (and ultimately invest in developing new services and improving existing ones).

But the point remains that we are increasingly allowing personal data to be used in ways that are not obviously related to the action we initially took in order to generate that data. To an ordinary Instagram user, it is not obvious that using the Instagram app will have any impact at all on their Facebook experience. When we think about data privacy, we normally think about a company giving or selling our information to someone else. But a single company using our information in ways that we did not anticipate raises privacy concerns that are just as significant.

What should we do about it?

Internal data sharing of some kind is for all practical purposes an inevitability. This need not be a bad thing if users are sufficiently well informed about how their data is being used and if they can opt-out of uses that they find objectionable. I propose three principles to guide us going forward:

* Better disclosure It should not be enough for a company to say that data can be shared across its services and among its affiliates. We should be given much more specific guidance. Whether disclosure is necessary should depend on how unexpected the sharing would be to an intended user. Some forms of internal sharing are obvious and need not be disclosed. We should assume that our data will be transferred to a company’s customer service department in order to handle our customer service inquiries. But if sharing is between unrelated products or services, users should be notified. This is especially the case if they are between separately branded services that do not reveal their common corporate affiliation (e.g. to an ordinary user, Instagram is not obviously owned by Facebook).
* More granular controls for users Users should be able to opt-out of internal sharing as a whole and also be given control to turn on and off particular kinds of sharing.
* Sensible defaults Despite the obvious benefit they offer, in practice many people simply won’t take the time to navigate through granular privacy controls. As a result, it is important for default settings to offer users a reasonable amount of protection.

As an increasing amount of the data we expose online is handled by a small number of companies that operate across multiple verticals, sharing between companies (external data sharing) could ultimately be less of a privacy concern than sharing within companies (internal data sharing). We should be concerned not only about _who_ controls our data but also _what_ they can do with it.

_Andrew Nicol is an entrepreneur and attorney based in New York City. He runs __Clickwrapped__, a not-for-profit service that rates leading consumer technology companies according to how well they respect their users’ rights. Follow him on Twitter __@aknicol__._

_Photo courtesy of Muellek Josef/Shutterstock._

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#SuryaRay #Surya Just in time for Cyber Monday, Deepfield released new numbers ranking online retail sites based on their traffic. Some of the results are surprising (Shopify, which offers an ecommerce platform for e-commerce sites, shows pretty good numbers); some less so (Amazon remains by far the largest and busiest site).

Deepfield, which offers services to build, manage and optimize network infrastructure, studied online shopping infrastructure by sampling internet backbone traffic across a “large cross section of North America and multiple collaborating infrastructure and internet providers.” The goal: To estimate how many users hit these sites daily and determine market share of the sites based on those numbers.

According to Deepfield’s results:

“What is truly impressive is how much larger Amazon shopping is compared to any other online site. Amazon is almost double the next largest shopping competitor, eBay, which enjoys 8.8% of daily Internet users.”

With Amazon, Deepfield includes a raft of smaller Amazon-owned sub-sites like MyHabit, although Zappos, which Amazon bought two years ago, was counted separately.

Deepfield included e-commerce hosting sites — including Shopify — to show how vibrant this market is. Shopify, which offers a web storefront that is used by more than 30,000 sites, garnered 5.4 percent market share among daily users. Quidsi, the company behind diapers.com, soap.com and other sites, also got a healthy 3.1 percent of daily visitors, and was also bought by Amazon in 2010.

The results are summarized in the Deepfield chart below:

_Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Shlomi Fish_

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#SuryaRay #Surya Black Friday numbers are strong across the board, with initial reports are coming in today from retailers and payments companies. As IBM reported earlier today, total online sales saw a surge of 20.7 percent in spending from last year. eBay owned PayPal is reporting that Black Friday global mobile payments volume was up 193 percent from last year. http://dlvr.it/2XJ6dT @suryaray

#SuryaRay #Surya Early reports from yesterday pointed to better than expected online sales on Thanksgiving, and PayPal and eBay are reporting strong Thanksgiving numbers on mobile as well. http://dlvr.it/2X5HfD @suryaray

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If you want to start your own online business, there are lots of ways to go without bothering with eBay. So why work with the online auctions giant?

More About: ebay, entrepreneur, features, mashable, open forum, self-employed http://dlvr.it/2VV4S0 @suryaray