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Barclays Group analyst Ben Reitzes spoke to Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer about the threat the new $199 e-reader/tablet hybrid poses to their uber-dominant iPad. Apparently the two execs were as cool as ice cubes in a fire-proof box on the matter. After the conversation, Reitzes wrote in a note to investors that the low price point will likely make some waves, but that the Android-based Kindle Fire also means more fragmentation in the tablet market--a phenomenon that has helped keep the iPad on top of the heap. Here's more of what Reitzes had to say:

While compatible with Android, the Apps work with Amazon products. The more fragmentation, the better, says Apple, since that could drive more consumers to the stable Apple platform. We believe that Apple will get more aggressive on price with the iPad eventually but not compromise the product quality and experience.

That remains to be seen. Amazon has so far contended that it's not looking to compete head-to-head with the iPad. The Kindle Fire's specs are significantly more spartan than those of Apple's slate, and--coupled with the disruptive price point--target a completely different type of tablet buyer (the iPad 2 starts at $499).

A freely accessible index of 5 billion web pages, their page rank, their link graphs and other metadata, hosted on Amazon EC2, was announced today by the Common Crawl Foundation. "It is crucial [in] our information-based society that Web crawl data be open and accessible to anyone who desires to utilize it," writes Foundation director Lisa Green on the organization's blog.

The Foundation is an organization dedicated to leveraging the falling costs of crawling and storage for the benefit of "individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits." It's lead by Gilad Elbaz, the forefather of Google AdSense and the CEO of data platform startup Factual. Joining Elbaz on the Foundation board is internet public domain champion Carl Malamud and semantic web serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack. Director Lisa Green came to the Foundation by way of Creative Commons.

The Foundation explains the scope of the project thusly. "Common Crawl is a Web Scale crawl, and as such, each version of our crawl contains billions of documents from the various sites that we are successfully able to crawl. This dataset can be tens of terabytes in size, making transfer of the crawl to interested third parties costly and impractical. In addition to this, performing data processing operations on a dataset this large requires parallel processing techniques, and a potentially large computer cluster. "Luckily for us, Amazon's EC2/S3 cloud computing infrastructure provides us with both a theoretically unlimited storage capacity coupled with localized access to an elastic compute cloud."

Cloud computing startup enStratus has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding to grow its business of managing all types of clouds across a common interface. El Dorado Ventures led the round with participation from Vesbridge Partners.

The long and short of enStratus’ technology is that it provides a secure platform for managing and monitoring popular public and private cloud offerings through a single interface. In theory, this means customers can utilize multiple clouds and even switch between cloud providers without having to learn the intricacies of each provider’s APIs or management consoles.

The Minneapolis-based EnStratus is similar to the more widely known RightScale service, although enStratus actually supports more clouds. It currently claims support for Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Bluelock, Cloud Central, Cloud.com, CloudSigma, EMC Atmos (e emc), Eucalyptus, Google Storage, GoGrid, Nimbula, OpenStack, Rackspace, Terremark, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Express and Windows Azure.

Mobile Flash is being killed off.

The plugin that launched a thousand online forum arguments and a technology standoff between Apple and the format's creator, Adobe, will no longer be developed for mobile browsers, the company said in a note that will accompany a financial briefing to analysts.

Instead the company will focus on development around HTML5 technologies, which enable modern browsers to do essentially the same functions as Flash did but without relying on Adobe's proprietary technologies, and which can be implemented across platforms.

The amount of money that Australian banks are spending on social media strategies is the equivalent of a “rounding error” when compared to the squillions they spend on advertising, delegates at a banking and finance conference heard on Friday. But the banks understand that although there isn’t yet a credible business case for much additional investment in the area, they can’t afford not to develop a presence on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Speaking at the FST Media Technology and Innovation conference in Sydney on Friday Michael Weeding, head of digital banking for Citibank said that “We are probably not going to have a business case at this point in time” for heavier investment in social media bank. But he reminded delegates that the same once held true for mobile phone investment.

In a very short period of time mobile banking has moved from novelty item to mainstream banking platform, and social media could well follow.

Strobe, an App Delivery Network that facilitates getting HTML5 apps up and running on various platforms and app stores, has joined Facebook, CEO Charles Jolley announced today.

Jolley is also the creator of the SproutCore JavaScript framework for web apps that is used to quickly build web apps in the browser. It’s used by companies like NPR, Second Story and Sports Illustrated, as well as being popular among Facebook app developers.

Before Jolley created SproutCore, he was responsible for Mobile Me app development at Apple.

TORONTO — Canadians who find themselves short of change for that Venti Skim Gingerbread Latte can now pay for their Starbucks beverage with the scan of an iPhone.

The Seattle-based company announced Tuesday that an app for Apple's mobile phones can now handle purchases, provided a customer has preloaded an account with money to spend.

The account can be funded within the app with a credit card.

Adyen, a provider of global internet payment and e-commerce services, has been selected by France-based cinema chain operator Pathé to power online and mobile payments for the latter’s 21 cinemas across the Netherlands.

Pathé in the Netherlands has chosen Adyen to integrate payment processing into its existing online and new mobile ticketing services.

With Ajax technology form Ayden, online and mobile payments are set to be processed on a single screen with a single click, instead of loading multiple pages to run through payment acceptance.

In this survey-based report, we look at the business drivers and adoption levels for social business and Enterprise 2.0 technologies, the benefits and issues being highlighted by users, and what platforms and infrastructures are being used for delivery.

We take a short look at three specific applications – Enterprise Q&A, Open Innovation, and Sales & Marketing collaboration – and make recommendations for maximizing the benefits from these new systems of engagement.

a survey administered by Jive Software that found both executives and knowledge workers believe social software will become a necessary part of doing business — even though the return on investment for this kind of software is still pretty squishy. 

Improving customer loyalty and service levels and driving increased revenue or sales were among the top reasons for using social software mentioned by survey respondents.

they shouldn't become so focused on attaining a hard ROI that they miss opportunities to use social to solve business problems.

As we heard earlier today, Thanksgiving proved to be a lucrative day for online retailers. IBM reported online Thanksgiving 2011 sales were up 39 percent over Thanksgiving 2010, with mobile shopping on the rise. eBay and PayPal are seeing similar trends. PayPal Mobile just announced a 511 percent increase in global mobile payment volume when compared to Thanksgiving 2010.

On Thanksgiving in the U.S., consumers shopped on mobile via PayPal most frequently between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. PST. Around the world, consumers shopped on mobile most frequently between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. PST.

There was a more than three-fold (350%) increase in the number of global customers shopping through PayPal mobile on Thanksgiving 2011 compared to last year. These shoppers were mainly located in New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago.

Leading coffee chain Starbucks is bringing its mobile payment system to its chain of 700 stores in the UK, allowing owners of the Apple iPhone to make payments for their purchase straight from their handset.

The mobile payment service is already up and running in the US, and is scheduled to launch in the UK from January 5th, when the mobile app should be launched in the Apple App Store.

The company claim that customers using the service reduce transaction time by around 10 seconds, which soon adds up when you are serving hundreds of customers a day. Customers who use the app can still get Starbucks freebies and other promotions added to their account.

Back in 2007, the Chief Executive of Visa Europe claimed that we could all be living in a cashless society by 2012. With that milestone fast approaching, it’s safe to assume that notes/bills and coins won’t be going the way of the dodo that quickly, but a new forecast has emerged from another giant from the finance world.

PayPal has produced a new report which will be released shortly – Money: The Digital Tipping Point – in which it predicts not only that consumers won’t need cash to go shopping, but they won’t need a wallet at all. And when can we expect this vision to be realized? 2016, it seems.

We’ve written quite extensively about mobile payment technology in recent times. Back in September we spoke with Ben Milne, founder of peer-to-peer Web and mobile payment platform Dwolla, who discussed the future of m-commerce. And prior to that, The Next Web’s Brad McCarty looked at how NFC will get its piece of the $4 quadrillion payments pie. There’s little question mobile payments will play a big part in the future of commerce. But will it completely outmanoeuvre paper, coins AND plastic by 2016?

45 mobile operators have pledged their support for subscriber identity module (SIM) based Near Field Communication (NFC) implementations in an announcement made by mobile industry trade body the GSM Association (GSMA).

The 45 operators involved account for nearly 3 billion subscriptions worldwide, and include China Mobile, Vodafone Group, América Móvil, Telefónica Group, China Unicom, Axiata, Bharti Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon Wireless, and AT&T.

Potential applications for this technology include mobile payments, public transit access, event ticketing, secure access to buildings or vehicles, identification, and person-to-person (P2P) data sharing.

Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates were computer science students without any real plan. They started Facebook because it was fun, used their talents, and was a novel way for Harvard students and alumni to stay in touch. Zuckerberg never anticipated it would host over 400 million members. And he had no clear idea where the money would come from. But he kept at it until, in 2007, Facebook let outside developers create applications for it, and game developers started buying ads on Facebook to keep attracting players. Hardly Zuckerberg’s strategy in 2004.And when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, started writing code in 1996 they had no clear plan or idea how they would make money either. But that didn’t stop them from starting. It wasn’t until 2002 and 2003 that AdWords and AdSense became the company’s money-making platform. Last week, in Don’t Get Distracted by Your Plan, I wrote about the importance of staying flexible, about the dangers of sticking too closely to your plan. But what if you have no plan? Read more at blogs.hbr.org