AllThingsD » Austria

eBay Acquires Invoicing Company in Germany

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 16:34:35 +0000

EBay has acquired BillSAFE, which serves 15 million accounts in Germany, after buying a minority stake in the company last year. Terms were not disclosed. With BillSAFE, PayPal customers will now be able to receive an invoice for an order, after items have been shipped and received. Because of its security benefits, purchasing by invoice is used heavily in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, eBay says.

Whitman: HP Decision on webOS Coming Within Two Weeks

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:25:42 +0000

Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman just gave an interview to Le Figaro, a French newspaper, saying that a decision on what to do with HP’s webOS software will come within the next two weeks.

Here’s the key quote, courtesy of Google Translate:

What will you do with your operating system webOS?

We should announce our decision in the next two weeks. This is not an easy decision, because we have a team of 600 people which is in limbo. We need to have another operating system.

Also in the interview, Whitman concedes that if iPads count as PCs, as the research firm Canalys has argued, then Apple will likely overtake HP as the world’s top vendor of PCs. But she says HP would try to retake the crown in 2013.

Whitman is in Europe for an HP corporate event in Vienna, at which HP made some big announcements on the enterprise IT front, specifically around a new concept it calls “information optimization.”

The interview, in the original French, is here; a fair translation into English is here.

When we last heard from Whitman on the subject of webOS, she admitted she wasn’t sure what to do. On Nov. 8, she told an all-hands meeting of HP’s webOS team that she was still mulling over the situation.

Having failed to get any traction in hardware sales, HP killed the TouchPad and all the other webOS-running hardware on Aug. 18. Yet in killing it, HP managed to make its TouchPad device suddenly popular — at a reduced price.

Whatever the result, the whole $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm — which created webOS — has turned out be a bit of a mess for HP. On its earnings call last week, the company said that it is writing off $1.66 billion related to the winding down of the webOS business. Decisions, decisions.

Amazon: It Was Our Hardware, Not Hackers, That Brought Us Down

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 17:35:41 +0000

Amazon customers in the U.K., Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain lost access to the service for about 30 minutes Sunday. That in itself is rare enough an occurrence that when it happens, it usually makes news.

However, when it first happened, many assumed that Anonymous–the loose affiliation of digital troublemakers who last week overwhelmed the Web sites of Mastercard and Visa–was making trouble again. Not so. In a statement to Bloomberg News, Amazon officially blamed the outage on the failure of some of its hardware at a facility in Dublin. Web monitoring service Netcraft has confirmed this by its own independent observations.

Amazon had last week come into the crosshairs of WikiLeaks supporters for its removal of files related to the organization’s leaks of previously secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

And indeed Anonymous had planned to attack Amazon but realized the target was too big and switched to PayPal instead.

iPhone 4 Hits 17 More Countries Friday

John Paczkowski — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:05:11 +0000

The iPhone 4’s international roll-out begins in earnest this week. Come Friday, July 30, the device will go on sale in 17 more countries–Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Left off the roll-out roll call, much to the dismay of its citizens, is South Korea, where regulatory issues are reportedly slowing things down. By September, the iPhone 4 should be in stores in 87 countries, making its global roll-out Apple’s fastest ever.

Hello World: Apple iPad Goes International on May 28

John Paczkowski — Fri, 07 May 2010 13:08:14 +0000

The international launch of the Apple iPad, which was delayed due to strong demand in the the U.S., will finally begin later this month.

Apple (AAPL) will start accepting pre-orders for both the 3G and Wi-Fi models on Monday, May 10. And on May 28, Apple will begin shipping units in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the U.K.

The launch will continue in July when the iPad arrives in nine additional countries: Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore.

Apple has already sold more than one million iPads in the U.S. since the launch of the Wi-Fi-only model on April 3 and the 3G version on April 30. Given these sales figures and Apple’s supply issues to date, it will be interesting to see how the international rollout goes.

T-Mobile Verkauft Eine Menge iPhones

John Paczkowski — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:21:34 +0000

Apple’s iPhone 3G is selling well overseas despite some activation and delivery problems. Deutsche Telekom’s (DT) wireless division, T-Mobile, has sold 120,000 of the devices since they arrived at market on July 11. “Our (sales) expectations were surpassed,” T-Mobile International CEO Hamid Akhavan told German magazine Focus, adding that 75,000 were sold in Germany alone. Interestingly, Akhavan said that the company hasn’t heard many complaints about the device’s reception issues in Germany.

News of iPhone 3G’s warm reception in some parts of Europe comes amid reports that Apple is finalizing a deal with will bring the device to Russia. Market sources tell Reuters that the company is talking to Mobile TeleSystems, Russia’s largest carrier, as well as Vimpelcom and MegFon. Eldar Murtazin, an analyst with Moscow-based Mobile Research Group, says Mobile TeleSystems expects iPhone sales over the next two years to reach one million. And if Apple (AAPL) inks deals with Vimpelcom and MegFon as well, it’s likely to triple that number. Said Murtazin, “Total sales by the Big Three carriers will amount to 3.5 million iPhones within the next two years.”