China :: Science & Technology

Yesterday the Central Bank announced the second batch of 13 licenses to online payment solution providers, bringing the total up to 40. The original batch included the major players such as Alibabas Alipay, Tencents Tenpay and Yeepay for vertical industry based transactions. The new batch includes CUP Shanghai, Hangzhou JETCO and Chengdu Mount Bao. However at least 200 payment solution company applicants are anxiously awaiting approval since the Central Bank originally set a deadline of September 1 to approve. Since the process is taking longer than expected, it is rumoured that the deadline will be pushed back. In June 2010, the Central Bank ordered non-financial institutions to apply and pay for a license to process online transactions. Research firm, Analysys has reported a sharp increase in online payments. For the second quarter, third-party online payment transactions hit 460.9 billion yuan an increase of 95.3% compared to last year. With the trend towards online payments, it is

Mobile video provider MobiTV became the latest in a string of companies to announce plans to go public Wednesday, filing an S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company hopes to raise $75 million through the initial public offering of its stock. First, the good news: MobiTV revenues are gradually growing, and its losses are gradually declining. The mobile video company reported full-year 2010 revenues of $66.8 million, which was up from $62.5 million a year before. For the first half of this year, MobiTVs sales grew to $36.9 million, up from $31.5 million in the first six months of 2010. Meanwhile, its net loss for the first half declined to $8.1 million, compared to $9.4 million a year earlier. The company has $32 million in cash on hand, after raising $115 million over the last decade. That said, MobiTV suffers a severe lack of diversity in its revenue streams, and faces the distinct possibility that it could lose all of its distribution p

A funny thing will soon happen to your TV remote: Not only will it get smarter and more usable, but it will also soon feel more natural to use. With controls based on gestures rather than directional buttons, the new controls will change the way viewers find and interact with content. Think about the way the computer business changed after moving to a graphical user interface. For most people my age, the first experience with point and click probably came in the school computer lab, where Apple educational discounts led a whole generation to interact with menus, applications and folders with the click of a mouse. (Even back then, Apple was trying to nab users early in life.) By comparison, the control menu and cursor-based navigation of MS-DOS seemed prehistoric. The adoption of graphical user interfaces for display and the mouse for control fundamentally changed not just how people used their computers, but opened up new applications and capabilities that previously werent available.

What if you could ask the author of a book a question while you were reading the book? Thats the kind of world Amazon wants to offer with its new @author feature , which the online bookstore launched on Wednesday with a group of writers including Susan Orlean and self-help guru Tim Ferriss. Readers can ask questions directly from their Kindles while they are reading a book, and the question gets sent to the authors Twitter account as well as to their home page at Amazon. In addition to creating what the company hopes will be a kind of reader community around Kindle titles something it has been pushing in other ways as well this new feature looks like another step in Amazons quest to cut publishers out of the equation and build relationships directly with authors. In addition to Orlean and Ferriss author of The Four-Hour Body and other similar books the Amazon pilot includes writers such as Steven Berlin Johnson, J.A. Konrath and John Locke. All have agreed to respond to reader q

A repeat of last year's missing iPhone prototype (pictured) playing out again? Gray Powell can take a little bit of comfort in todays news: According to a report Wednesday, hes not the only person to lose track of an unreleased iPhone in a bar. CNET reports that Apple has again lost a prototype of an unreleased iPhone. It went missing in a San Francisco tequila bar last month, and then was possibly sold by a San Francisco man on Craigslist for $200. Its the second high-profile Apple prototype to go missing and wind up on a public online sales site this year, and of course, follows last years missing iPhone 4 prototype brouhaha. CNET says Apple was desperate for the missing iPhones return: Apple electronically traced the phone to a two-floor, single-family home in San Franciscos Bernal Heights neighborhood, according to the source. When San Francisco police and Apples investigators visited the house, they spoke with a man in his twenties who acknowledged being at Cava 22 on the ni

If you hadnt heard of solar startup Solyndra before, get ready to start hearing a lot more about the company. But not because of its great achievements. Solyndra just became a high-profile casualty of the youthful solar industry as Solyndra failed to compete successfully against larger solar rivals in a global market that depends heavily on government subsidies. The solar panel maker, known for its novel technology and for clinching a flagship $535 million federal loan guarantee in 2009 to build a factory , was supposed to become an American success story of greentech innovation and manufacturing. That loan guarantee, which came from the stimulus package, was meant to propel Solyndra from a startup to a full-fledge maker of solar panels and show how the U.S. will become a leader in clean power and green jobs. Cue the sound of screeching wheels and a car crash here. Those hopes were largely dashed this morning as Solyndra said it plans to file for bankruptcy and will lay off its 1,100

Software maker Openwave Systems is not going to sit idly by and watch all the other kids have all the patent lawsuit fun. On Wednesday the San Francisco Bay area company filed suit with the International Trade Commission and a federal court in Delaware accusing Apple and RIM mobile devices of infringing on five of its mobile Internet connection patents. Openwave is asking to be paid licensing fees by the two mobile heavyweights, joining a long line of players in the mobile space who are currently using the U.S. patent system to squeeze revenue from their intellectual property portfolios. The complaint lists Apples iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod touch, iPad and iPad 2, and RIMs Blackberry Curve 9330 and Blackberry PlayBook as infringing on five Openwave patents. Those are, according to Openwave: Patent that generally allows a user to use e-mail applications on a mobile device when the network is unavailable such as when a user is on an airplane. Patent that generally allows t