Gates backs cell phone banking for Haiti

The massive earthquake in Haiti in January destroyed a third or more of the country's banks and ATMs, but even before the quake fewer than 1 in 10 Haitians had ever used a traditional bank.

Aiming to broaden access to financial institutions and aid in the recovery, the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development announced Tuesday a plan to back up to $10 million in funding to spur the use of cell phone banking, an approach that has worked elsewhere to bring financing to the poor.

Paul Tertilus writes a text message earlier this month to his girlfriend from a tent city in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. The Gates Foundation is hoping to spur use of cell phones for making mobile payments.

(Credit: Natasha Fillion/Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)

"Out of the ruins of Haiti's tragic earthquake, there is an unprecedented opportunity to improve the lives of millions of Haitians and unlock the country's economic potential through mobile money," said Mark Suzman, acting president of the Global Development Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in a statement. "Making financial services widely available to the poorest families in the developing world can help break the cycle of poverty by giving them a safe place to save, guard against risks, build assets, and provide opportunities for the next generation."

The fund will offer cash awards to companies that build mobile financial services in Haiti, giving $2.5 million to the first country that launches a mobile banking service in the next six months and hits certain goals. The second company that does so within 12 months will get $1.5 million, while the remaining $6 million will be awarded proportionately to those services that process the first 5 million transactions.

The program's backers hope that, in the short term, mobile banking will make it easier to distribute humanitarian aid, including various cash-for-work programs. Over time, the hope is that a mobile banking system will leave Haitians with broad access to savings and other financial services that were not widely available before the quake.

A program in Kenya, known as M-Pesa, reaches 9 million people--40 percent of adult Kenyans--just three years after its launch. The service allows a range of goods and services, from taxi fares to school fees--to be paid by phone. The Gates Foundation touts a recent University of Edinburgh study that suggests rural households using M-Pesa saw their income increase by 5 percent to 30 percent.

Mildred, an M-PESA agent helps a customers at a booth in Eldoret, Kenya. M-PESA allows Kenyans to make payments using their cell phones.

(Credit: Frederic Courbet/Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)

Bill Gates has been a big proponent of the role cell phones can play in bringing access to banking, particularly savings, to the poor. He touted the Kenyan program during a stop in Berkeley, Calif., on his recent speaking tour at top U.S. colleges.

"Poor people don't have saving accounts," Gates said. "The financial system doesn't work for the poor."

Setback for TiVo in long-running patent dispute

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Tuesday rejected a claim by TiVo that it owns the patent on time-warp DVR technology.

TiVo released this statement Tuesday: "While TiVo is disappointed with this recent PTO office action, this is just one of several steps in the review process. We will continue to work with the PTO to explain the validity of the claims under review. It is important to note that TiVo received a 'final action' holding several claims invalid during EchoStar's first re-examination request at this juncture only to have the PTO ultimately uphold the validity of all claims of the patent."

Dish Network said it was encouraged by the ruling in the case running parallel to its own TiVo patent lawsuit.

"We are pleased the Patent and Trademark Office issued a Final Office Action maintaining its rejection of the software claims of TiVo's patent," Dish Network said in a statement. "These software claims are the same claims that EchoStar was found to have infringed in the contempt ruling now pending for en banc review by the Federal Circuit."

Though the two cases are technically unrelated, the uncertainty could be bad news for TiVo's the long-running dispute with EchoStar/Dish Network. In 2006, a Texas court first found Dish Network and its parent company EchoStar (they have since split into two companies) guilty of using TiVo's patented "time-warping" DVR technology. EchoStar was ordered to pay $74 million to TiVo. That amount was raised in September 2009 to $200 million.

But last month an appeals court granted EchoStar's petition for a rehearing of the case. A panel of three or more appellate judges will be listening to both sides re-argue the case, but this time, TiVo won't have the U.S. PTO's stamp of approval on its time-warp patent, which could cause a very different outcome this time around.

Twitter tests its own URL shortener

Twitter has squeezed the way we communicate, and now it is putting the squeeze on Web links users share on the microblogging service.

Twitter is testing a new service--called t.co--to wrap and abbreviate all links shared on the site in the same way other URL-shortening services such as Bit.ly do. The move is designed to increase security on the site, as well as offering analytics and related services for the company's Promoted Tweets platform, Twitter spokesperson Sean Garrett wrote in the post announcing the move Tuesday afternoon.

To illustrate how URLs would appear after testing is complete, Garrett said that a URL such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might appear on Twitter wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj on mobile devices. However, users viewing the message on a computer will still see the entire URL.

"If you are already partial to a particular shortener when you tweet, you can continue to use it for link shortening and analytics as you normally would, and we'll wrap the shortened links you submit," Garrett wrote.

However, t.co is likely to put the squeeze on new competitors such as Bit.ly, which also offer analytics services and custom domains for corporations. The related services Twitter referred to might include content recommendation, suggesting content that users might want to consume.

The move isn't a total surprise. After a series of phishing attacks in February, Twitter launched a filtering servicein March to detect malicious links designed to dupe users into revealing their login credentials and other attacks

California utility plows ahead with midsize solar

California utility Pacific Gas & Electric got approval for an initiative that seeks to ramp up solar-power production but sidestep the permitting hurdles of large-scale solar and the expense of rooftop panels.
The California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday approved a five-year program where PG&E will install solar photovoltaic arrays between 1 megawatt and 20 megawatts in size. In all, the installations will have a capacity of 500 megawatts worth of solar, enough to power 150,000 homes, according to PG&E.The approach is to build midsize solar arrays and locate them near power substations, which means that no new transmissions lines will need to be built. Constructing smaller, distributed units also simplifies the environmental permitting process, another serious hurdle to building power plant-size solar projects."Smaller scale projects can avoid many of the pitfalls that have plagued larger renewable projects in California, including permitting and transmission challenges," CPUC president Michael Peevey said in a statement.
California has a renewable portfolio standard where utilities need to get 20 percent of their electricity by the end of this year. PG&E will own and operate about half of the installations and purchase power from independent developers, it said.
The technology used for these projects will be familiar solar photovoltaic panels, but the program could also see the use of concentrating photovoltaic arrays, where mirrors concentrate light to draw more electricity from high-end solar cells. Amonix, a company in that field, raised $129 million earlier this week to pursue the utility business.

Twitter Loses Its Scrappy Start-Up Status

Twitter’s first developer conference, held this week in San Francisco, served as a coming-out party for the four-year-old service. Twitter the start-up is becoming Twitter the big company, with more polish, controversy, competition and revenue.
At the conference, called Chirp, Twitter announced several new features that will make it more useful, including geo-location services, a database of places and additional metadata for posts. It also offered details about @anywhere, a new service that lets people gain access to Twitter from elsewhere on the Web.

These new features could expand Twitter’s reach, but it also pits the company against other popular Web companies, including Facebook and Foursquare.

“They’ve gone from a data play to a platform play,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter Group, a digital strategy consulting firm. “You’re seeing the same behavior that Facebook, Google and other online communities have done. This is a natural evolution of a Web company.”

As evidence of its growth, Twitter revealed some previously undisclosed numbers. It has 106 million registered users and is adding new users at the rate of 300,000 a day. Those customers write 55 million daily posts, and 180 million people log on to Twitter.com each month to read them.

Despite the growth, Twitter has a pressing need to make the service easier to understand for new users, said Evan Williams, its chief executive. “It’s amazing it’s grown so fast given how hard it is to use.”

One of the new features Twitter announced is called points of interest. People on Twitter have been able to include their general location. But now they will be able to reveal exactly where they are. People will be able to search for a certain location, like a concert hall or hotel, and see all the posts written from that spot.

This is similar to the check-ins on Foursquare, Gowalla and other services that people use to share their location. Mr. Williams said that Twitter was not trying to duplicate those services but rather provide Twitter users with more relevant content.

“Where you are defines what you’re interested in,” he said.

Twitter and its developers will build a database of places — parks, restaurants, hospitals and the like — across the world so people can refer to them in posts.

Another new tool is called annotations. Already, individual posts show which app someone used to write the post and the date, time and (if users choose to make it public) location. With annotations, software developers will be able to add other material, which Twitter calls metadata, to Twitter posts.

This could significantly expand the amount of information a post includes, beyond its 140 characters, and could enhance the way Twitter is used.

Posts could include the name of the restaurant where a post was written and its star rating on Yelp, for instance. Then, someone could find Twitter posts about restaurants nearby with five stars. Or developers could add a way to make a payment and purchase, so retailers could sell items from within a post.

Twitter does not know what developers will decide to do with the tool, said Ryan Sarver, who manages the Twitter platform. “The underlying idea is think big, push yourself.”

Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer, gave details about @anywhere, which was first announced at the South by Southwest conference. (Initial partners include more than a dozen news sites, including The New York Times Company.) Similar to Facebook Connect, @anywhere will allow people to log in to Twitter from other Web sites.

When visiting a magazine Web site, for instance, a user could sign in to Twitter, hover the cursor over a writer’s byline and follow the writer on Twitter or write a post without leaving the page. The magazine could also suggest other writers that the reader should follow on Twitter.

Twitter also said it would incorporate more outside services — including an Android app and a link shortener — into its own service, either by acquiring start-ups or building its own tools.

This added to the unease that many software developers have felt since last week, when Twitter announced its own iPhone and BlackBerry apps. Developers who make these types of apps worry that Twitter could put them out of business.

Twitter tried to reassure developers, by emphasizing how crucial they have been to Twitter’s success.

Developers have built more than 100,000 Twitter apps, and 75 percent of Twitter’s traffic comes from people using these apps instead of Twitter.com.

Web Coupons Know a Lot About You, and They Tell

For decades, shoppers have taken advantage of coupons. Now, the coupons are taking advantage of the shoppers.

A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.

And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit” or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell his fiancée).

Coupons from the Internet are the fastest-growing part of the coupon world — their redemption increased 263 percent to about 50 million coupons in 2009, according to the coupon-processing company Inmar. Using coupons to link Internet behavior with in-store shopping lets retailers figure out which ad slogans or online product promotions work best, how long someone waits between searching and shopping, even what offers a shopper will respond to or ignore.

The coupons can, in some cases, be tracked not just to an anonymous shopper but to an identifiable person: a retailer could know that Amy Smith printed a 15 percent-off coupon after searching for appliance discounts at Ebates.com on Friday at 1:30 p.m. and redeemed it later that afternoon at the store.

“You can really key into who they are,” said Don Batsford Jr., who works on online advertising for the tax preparation company Jackson Hewitt, whose coupons include search information. “It’s almost like being able to read their mind, because they’re confessing to the search engine what they’re looking for.”

While companies once had a slim dossier on each consumer, they now have databases packed with information. And every time a person goes shopping, visits a Web site or buys something, the database gets another entry.

“There is a feeling that anonymity in this space is kind of dead,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s information privacy programs.

None of the tracking is visible to consumers. The coupons, for companies as diverse as Ruby Tuesday and Lord & Taylor, are handled by a company called RevTrax, which displays them on the retailers’ sites or on coupon Web sites, not its own site.

Even if consumers could figure out that RevTrax was creating the coupons, it does not have a privacy policy on its site — RevTrax says that is because it handles data for the retailers and does not directly interact with consumers. RevTrax can also include retailers’ own client identification numbers (Amy Smith might be client No. 2458230), then the retailer can connect that with the actual person if it wants to, for example, to send a follow-up offer or a thank-you note.

Using coupons also lets the retailers get around Google hurdles. Google allows its search advertisers to see reports on which keywords are working well as a whole but not on how each person is responding to each slogan.

“We’ve built privacy protections into all Google services and report Web site trends only in aggregate, without identifying individual users,” Sandra Heikkinen, a spokeswoman for Google, said in an e-mail message.

The retailers, however, can get to an individual level by sending different keyword searches to different Web addresses. The distinct Web addresses are invisible to the consumer, who usually sees just a Web page with a simple address at the top of it.

So clicking on an ad for Jackson Hewitt after searching for “new 2010 deductions” would send someone to a different behind-the-scenes URL than after searching for “Jackson Hewitt 2010,” though the Web pages and addresses might look identical. This data could be coded onto a coupon.

RevTrax works as closely with image-rich display ads, with coupons also signaling what ad a person saw and on what site.

“Wherever we provide a link, whether it’s on search or banner, that thing you click can include actual keywords,” said Rob O’Neil, director of online marketing at Tag New Media, which works with Filene’s. “There’s some trickery.”

The companies argue that the coupon strategy gives them direct feedback on how well their marketing is working.

Once the shopper prints an online coupon or sends it to his cellphone and then goes to a store, the clerk scans it. The bar code information is sent to RevTrax, which, with the ad agency, analyzes it.

As Cellular Service Expands in Subways, Thefts Rise

BOSTON — Nashira Muniz was sending a text message on her cellphone the other day when the phone rang. “I just texted you!” she said to the caller. Nothing unusual about that, except Ms. Muniz, 25, was deep underground, riding the subway.
She then checked on her child at home, made a banking transaction, received a few Facebook notices and arranged to meet another friend — all from the subterranean depths.

Last month, Boston completed installation of cellphone service — at least for T-Mobile subscribers — along all 11 miles of the Orange line, the first of its four subway lines to have end-to-end coverage. But the service has highlighted a problem, and it is not the expected one of fellow passengers yakking loudly.

The bigger problem, transit officials said, is cellphone theft, a growing concern throughout the country. Thefts occur even in subway systems that do not have cellular coverage because passengers display their phones as they read or listen to music and hope to catch the occasional signal that leaks through a street grate or when the train goes above ground.

The rise in thefts could correlate to the spread of high-end smart phones, transit officials said. Ordinary phones have little resale value, especially because victims usually turn off their service once the phone is stolen. But some phones can be reactivated by replacing the personal identity card.

Still, as underground coverage expands, transit officials are concerned that even more phones will be on display, tempting thieves.

The snatching of phones in Boston’s subway system, known as the T, jumped 70 percent in the first three months of this year compared with the first three months of last year (46 stolen phones compared with 27). In 2009, the number of thefts in the Metro system in Washington rose 65 percent (to 894 from 581) over 2008, a spokesman said, and most of those were cellphones.

Of the 14 underground subway systems in urban areas in the United States, many by now provide some cellular coverage. A glaring exception is the New York City subway system, by far the country’s largest, where the lack of underground service often leaves passengers standing in stairwells to finish a call before heading down to the trains.

(The planned wiring of New York’s underground stations, but not the tunnels, which was announced in 2007, has not materialized; a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said the plan was “under review.”)

Boston, which has the nation’s oldest subway system, has had cellphone coverage at four downtown stations since 2007. The entire system is to have coverage by the end of next year and will include more providers, including AT&T, which is to begin testing its service on the Orange line next week.

When transit officials announced the wiring of the Orange line last month, they simultaneously announced a public education program urging passengers to be alert to thieves.

“Do you own a cellphone?” a male voice blares over the public address system in some T stations. “Of course you do.” The voice goes on to instruct passengers to “protect your phone from curious onlookers.” Placards warn: “Show how smart you are: don’t show off your smart phone.”

The police say most thefts occur when passengers are sitting or standing in the subway near the door and paying more attention to their phones than to their surroundings. The thief snatches the phone and darts out of the train just as the doors shut.

“It’s taken right from the hand,” said Deputy Chief Joseph O’Connor of the transit police. “People looking to steal them will take advantage of the relaxed customer.”

Philadelphia has also stepped up its fight against cellphone thefts, as part of a larger program to curb juvenile crime. When school lets out, around 3:15 p.m., the police force in the subways is doubled, said Jerri Williams, a spokeswoman for Philadelphia’s regional transit system. Thefts on the subways, 80 percent of which involve cellphones, she said, are down this year.

On a recent afternoon here, after school was out and rush hour had started, it seemed that at least half of the passengers in several cars were staring into their phones, many of them sending text messages and reading e-mail messages.

A few said they worried about their phones being stolen, but more were like Josh Ernstoff, 30, a business analyst, who shrugged: “Cellphones are a dime a dozen. If I lose it, I’ll turn it off and get another one.”