E-commerce

After a meteoric run-up in the valuation of Bitcoin in the past month, the virtual currency suffered a dramatic correction today, losing more than 60 percent before mounting a bit of a recovery.

The peer-to-peer currency, which has quadrupled in value in the past four weeks, traded as high as $266 per Bitcoin today before plummeting to $105. It recovered to trade at $145 as of this writing, a one-day loss of 37 percent. Despite today's losses, Bitcoin is still up more than 1,000 percent in the past three months.

Today's drop came amid another distributed denial-of-service … Read more

Bitcoin got a boost of confidence of sorts today from a group of investors interested in creating a trading platform for the virtual currency phenom.

The decentralized peer-to-peer currency traded as high as $240 per Bitcoin today before closing at $233, up nearly $45 for the day, according to Mt. Gox, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange. Overall, Bitcoin has appreciated more than 1,500 percent since January, a meteoric rise that observers credit largely to financial uncertainty in Europe and nascent investor curiosity.

Coinsetter is hoping to capitalize on that interest with the launch of a Forex trading platform … Read more

Barnes & Noble is replacing its self-publishing platform, PubIt, with a new system presumably designed to make publishing with the bookseller easier than doing so with rival Amazon.

Nook Press lets authors compose the book within the platform, instead of requiring them to upload a file and convert it to the system's formatting. An author need only upload the content once and then write and edit within Nook Press, and preview the work, before it turns into an ePub file.

Theresa Horner, Barnes & Noble's VP of Digital Content for Nook Media, said this allows authors to avoid … Read more

Google is giving its Google Play marketplace app a makeover, with an emphasis on a simpler layout and content discovery.

Rolling out today to Android phones and tablets, the app's redesigned user interface specifically is intended to improve the entertainment experience, whether it's listening to an album, reading a book, or playing a game. The new interface features a lighter background and larger images that are set in cards, the same presentation format Google uses in its Google Now predictive search feature.

The makeover also automatically groups together similarly themed content to help users discover related magazines or … Read more

In the tech world, crowdfunding is most associated with Kickstarter and raising money for technology-centered projects like the Ouya gaming console, the Elevation Dock, and the Pebble smartwatch. But, the concept has a far wider reach than just consumer devices.

Global crowdfunding raised nearly $2.7 billion for more than 1 million campaigns in 2012, according to a new report by Massolution. This means that the crowdfunding market grew by 81 percent over the year prior.

"While lending-, donation-, and reward-based crowdfunding have thus far been leading this global financial revolution," CEO of Massolution Carl Esposti said in … Read more

Mozilla is hoping to streamline payments for Web apps by adding a new API into its forthcoming Firefox OS that is designed to make the process easier and more secure.

The organization announced the first draft of a new payment system API last week in a blog post. The API will be integrated into Firefox OS with the aim of making payment processing simpler and provide better security and control for users. Firefox OS is Mozilla's upcoming mobile operating system.

Mozilla said that while online services such as PayPal go some way to simplifying accepting Web payments, they aren'… Read more

Apple may finally step its toes into the digital wallet world over the next year or two, forecasts Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

The analyst believes a payment option for iOS users may launch with the iPhone 6 in the first half of 2014. Apple will use a technology other than or in addition to near-field communications (NFC), but its system will work with existing mobile payment solutions.

The company already has one major asset ripe for a digital wallet system -- its users.

Apple holds the key to around 500 million iTunes users and their linked credit cards, which … Read more

The value of Bitcoin has been skyrocketing of late, gaining more than 50 percent in the last few days, but two unrelated events today knocked the virtual currency back down a bit.

The peer-to-peer currency, which was languishing in the midteens in January, surged past $100 on Monday and was trading as high as $147 today before an hour-long outage at Mt. Gox, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, pushed its value down to $115. The currency rebounded a bit to close at $123, a 500 percent increase in the past two months.

Mt. Gox initially blamed the outage on … Read more

A decent shrink costs at least $100 an hour.

A decent pair of shoes can cost you the same and they last a lot longer. They understand you better too.

Surely, therefore, we shouldn't be surprised that more than half of all Americans admit that if they want to feel better, shopping is their chosen Xanax.

With just a click or two, you can be clicking your heels and forgetting the awful lover who told you that this was surely forever before becoming surly last night.

I have on my screen the results of a survey performed by TNS … Read more