Thursday, September 24

Monetize: PayPal Open API & Innovate 09 for only $49

The future is calling. PayPal is announcing a new, open platform which will help you monetize your applications and innovations. Check the one minute video below to grasp the possibilities.


On November 3 - 4 in San Francisco at PayPal X Innovate 2009, they will open their payment platform to third-party developers. By releasing new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), PayPal is enabling the developer community to build new ways to pay and get paid. Twitpay, a Twitter-based payment service, LiveOps, a new on-demand workforce service and Microsoft’s Windows® Azure are some of the first applications.

eBay Inc CEO John Donahoe, as well as PayPal President Scott Thompson and VP of Platform/ Emerging Technology, Osama Bedier will be presenting keynotes.

Visit the conference site and attend for only $49 Paypal will $49 to charity for each signup. Wow, what a deal (your secret code is tc).

Monday, September 7

The Basics: Using Social Media for Online Sellers

In my years of speaking and writing For Dummies books, I have learned that most of us tend to be shy about admitting we don't know the basic ins and outs of new technologies. It really is OK - didn't your mother tell you there were no stupid questions? (My Mom did). There's a daily barrage of new tech stuff that I have questions about almost every day; believe me I am quick to ask to get answers. We have lives to live and there's no way we can be on top of the latest of everything!

At a recent ecommerce conference, I decided to close my talk with a bit of information on basic best practices of social media for online sellers. Even though many people in the room were already participating on Twitter and Facebook, the information was well received. Probably because we all feel good with the validation of what we think we know is really true.

In this portion of my talk, I give you the basics on how to smartly use Twitter to build your business base. Below the video you'll find a short list of Twitter commands. See you on Twitter!



Twitter Basic Commands
@username = Reply to another Twitter member
D username = Direct Message, a message to the recipient not seen in the public tweetstream
PRT = Partial Retweet or Please Retweet = a plea to other members of Twitter to spead the word and rebroadcast the tweet
RT = Retweet: used before a retweet to credit the orginal post
#followfriday = A list of recommended users to follow on Fridays. One of many themes on Twitter days.
# Hasttags are used to add context to a tweet or make your post easily searchable. A basic descirption of how to use hashtags is posted on Mahalo.

Tuesday, September 1

Can Social Media get more fun? Try Whrrl

If you want to share information about yourself, your friends, a product or event, and don't want to do the usual announcement - there's a fun and easy tool.

Using Whrrl, you can take pictures with your iPhone (there's a free app) or MMS enabled cell phone and turn them into a story complete with location, notes and the participants. You can also start and edit stories from the Whrrl website. Telling stories with Whrrl helps you capture and share moments of your life with your friends and family in a whole new way.

My friends, Heather Meeker, AV Flox and I had a lot of fun with a box of cosmetics from e.l.f. We had never used their products and decided to put them to the test by dressing up (and making up) like stars from the past. Take a look at our Whrrl story below. It was a lot of fun - I give Whrrl five stars!

★★★★★

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