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Dynamic Business
ATO's green light to hunt eBay tax cheats
Herald Sun
THE Australian Tax Office has been given approval to trawl through eBay and The Trading Post transactions in a massive Australia-wide ...
ATO goes after eBay sellersCRN Australia
ATO targets eBay and Trading Post sellersSmartCompany.com.au
Tax office targets online salesABC Online
Sydney Morning Herald -ZDNet Australia -Tax-news.com (subscription)
all 26 news articles »

Featured eBay Auctions: Trypticon, Grandus, Defensor, Menasor, Arcee, Nucleon ...
seibertron.com
Every few days we'll be bringing you some cool Transformers eBay auctions that are worth taking a look at. If you have eBay Transformers auctions, ...

and more »

Ha'aretz
Meg Whitman submits her resume to California voters
MarketWatch
Whitman's record at eBay is paramount; she has virtually no political experience to rely on as she takes on Brown, the state's attorney general who also was ...
Jerry Brown calls state's global warming law the key difference between ...San Jose Mercury News
Former eBay boss Whitman says firm is 'platform for business'Parcel2Go.com
George Stephanopoulos Chides Ebay's Meg Whitman: 'You've Made a Fortune'NewsBusters (blog)
Los Angeles Times (blog) -ABC News (blog) -San Francisco Chronicle (blog)
all 254 news articles »

eBay Supports Resolution to Protect Small Internet Businesses
PR Newswire (press release)
WASHINGTON, July 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Tod Cohen, Vice President for Government Relations and Deputy General Counsel at eBay Inc., ...

and more »

KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released and KDE SC 4.6 is being discussed. However, Martin Graesslin has revealed some details about what they are planning for KDE 4.7. According to Martin's blog post, they are looking at OpenGL 3.0 to provide the compositing effects in KDE SC 4.7. OpenGL 3.0 provides support for frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers. Read more here

Personal details of 100m Facebook users have been harvested and published on the net by a security consultant. The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user's profile, their name and unique ID. BBC News

BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion has distributed invites to an exclusive media event in New York, where it's expected to show off the first device to run the brand new BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 6. CIO.com offers predictions for how the event will unfold.

The GNOME foundation and the LiMo group announced a partnership to help push Linux forward in the consumer field. The only notice that anyone has seem to have taken is mockery. So why can someone announce some dedication to promoting open source software in the mobile space and generate no enthusiasm in the mobile space? Android.

GNOME developer Dave Neary has posted the highlights of his work to determine where contributions to GNOME come from. This "Census" is a combination of data mining and surveys that gives a snapshot of gnome activity and the profile of a GNOME contributor. This project's aims were to answer three questions in particular: What does the developer community look like? What companies are investing in GNOME, and how? What does the commercial ecosystem around the GNOME project look like?

During the currently ongoing GUADEC conference in Den Haag the GNOME release team announced that GNOME 3.0 would be delayed for another six months and is now scheduled for March 2011. "We could release in September and have something working that is okayish, but it's not up to the standards we have" release team member Vincent Untz explains the reasoning. There's coverage of this issue at derStandard.at and an official GNOME press release.

The latest panic in desktop Linux lad was that Dell would no longer be selling Ubuntu pre-installed on laptops and netbooks. Alas, for those who love drama, it wasn't true. In fact, Dell is expanding its Ubuntu desktop Linux offerings.

TechCrunch reader Saul Lustgarten checks in to tell us he logged on to Facebook this morning and noticed that the list of his friends who are having their birthday today was preceded by a crude message, reading “fuck you bitches”.

Yeah right, we thought. I checked it out on my Facebook profile and didn’t notice anything off.

Then, I followed Saul’s suggestion of switching my main language to Spanish instead of English, and lo and behold (click for full-size image):

We’ve contacted Facebook to see if they really mean it.

CrunchBase InformationFacebookInformation provided by CrunchBase

Amazon announced the Kindle 3 last night, and it doesn’t look too shabby at all. The most important part is the inclusion of the next-generation E-Ink display, previously only found in the too-big-for-casual-use Kindle DX. (The low price, $139 for the Wi-Fi version, certainly doesn’t hurt.)

Immediately following the announcement, I saw something that confused me. For whatever reason, it seems plenty of people are comparing the Kindle to the iPad, almost as if these people want the Kindle to be the iPad. Why is that?

How’s this for absolutely dominating an increasingly lucrative and fast-growing segment?

Google currently boasts a mobile search market share of 98.29%, with it closest competitor Yahoo taking up just over 0.8% of market share and Microsoft’s Bing barely touching even half that, according to recent data from StatCounter as relayed by Pingdom.

This graph, made by Pingdom, puts it all in perspective:

As you can tell from the graph, put together using global visitor stats for more than three million websites, Google’s near-100% piece of the mobile search pie is even a good deal larger than their still impressive share of the overall search engine market. Note that the red bars represent non-mobile search market share, not a combination of both.

As for Yahoo, Bing, and the ‘others’ – good luck taking on Google on that front.

CrunchBase InformationGoogle SearchInformation provided by CrunchBase

App store analytics provider Distimo in its latest report once again focuses on in-app purchases across a variety of mobile application stores, Apple’s App Store in particular.

According to Distimo, the percentage of applications with in-app purchases is significantly higher in the App Store for iPad (10%) compared to that for the iPhone (2%).

One of the main reasons for that, still according to the startup, is the fact that the App Store for iPad became available after in-app purchases were introduced, contrary to the App Store for iPhone. Another reason to take into consideration is that the iPad may currently be used more as a media consumption device than the iPhone, with magazine and newspaper publishers selling much of their content as in-app purchases.

Evidently, the fact that there are more applications available for the iPhone than for the iPad also skews the numbers.

(Click image for full size)

In any event, the Games and Social Networking categories in both stores have the highest proportion of applications with in-app purchases available, the startup posits.

The most successful free applications that monetized using in-app purchases this month in the Apple App Store for iPhone were MobiTV and ESPN 2010 FIFA World Cup, which isn’t surprising considering there was this little event called the World Cup going on.

As for paid applications: the apps that saw the strongest level of monetization with in-app purchases this month in the App Store for iPhone were Guitar Hero, TomTom U.S.A. and Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies II.

Pages and iBooks (both apps are published by Apple) are both, again, the number one paid and free applications on the Apple App Store for iPad in terms of total download numbers.

Netflix for iPad, introduced back in April, is the second most popular free iPad app, while RSS reading app Pulse comes in at second place in the paid applications ranking.

CrunchBase InformationDistimoInformation provided by CrunchBase

CNET
Netflix's Payments To Studios Going Big, Rises From $31M To $116M
wwwery (blog)
... that the Hollywood studios weren't very happy when they saw the payments that they get, the amount that Netflix makes from its Online rental service. ...
Netflix delights studios with big checksCNET

all 3 news articles »

“All I’ve done is compile public information into a nice format for statistical analysis.” So says the man who is being called the Facebook hacker. Ron Bowes, a security consultant who’s also an nmap developer, is under fire from certain sections of the Internet for creating and uploading a torrent that contains more than 100 million Facebook users’ information. The thing is, all of this information was already publicly available in the Facebook directory. So to call him a “hacker,” well, would be incorrect.

Lucky Room
US House Committee Votes in Favor of Online Gambling Regulation Bill
PokerListings.com
... in response to the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), which restricted the use of the payments system for Americans who gamble online. ...
Internet Gambling Could Generate Billions for the GovernmentNPR (blog)
US Online Poker Bill Passed By Federal LawmakersOnline Poker.net
Barney Frank's Attempt To Allow & Tax Online Gambling Moves Forward (Again)Techdirt
WalletPop (blog) -RecentPoker.com -BloodHorse
all 158 news articles »

CRE Secure Now Integrated Into Electronic Merchant Systems Gateway
NewsBlaze
... Secure's service achieve full PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards) compliance relative to their processing of card payments online. ...

and more »

Elon Musk certainly hasn’t been on the down-low lately. Well, with the Tesla’s IPO and then Toyota huge investment and manufacturing deals. Then there’s the lawsuits and his devoice. So yeah, it’s no wonder that Jon Favreau modeled his Tony Stark character after Elon — or so says Wikipedia.

But last night he had a friendly fireside chat with Stephen Colbert, where it was really nothing more than reading of the man’s resume and talking about his ventures. Of course Colbert talked circles around the PayPal co-founder as he tends to do. It’s not like The Colbert Report is known as a hard-hitting news program anyway. That’s more the style of The Daily Show. Click through for the video.