Thursday, March 1, 2012
Business management software firm The Sage Group PLC said its subsidiary Sage North America is partnering with 32 nonprofit Girl Scouts of the USA Councils in 23 states, collectively representing more than 40,000 members, to offer a mobile payments option during the scout's annual cookie sales.
Girl Scouts in northeast Ohio reported a 13 percent increase in sales after introducing mobile payments in 2011, a year when many troops reported flat sales.
The popular Girl Scout cookie sales are the primary funding for Girl Scout Councils' activities and programs. Those sales are expected to be positively impacted by the Sage Mobile Payments application and credit card swipers attached to smart phones or tablet computers. The scouts using said devices will be able to accept both credit and debit card payments. The system's back-end will reconcile sales and deposits for each troop.
A new cross-industry organization formed to address ongoing, Internet-related security, privacy and reliability concerns was launched at the RSA Conference USA 2012 in San Francisco Feb. 29, 2012. The Trustworthy Internet Movement is a nonprofit, vendor-neutral effort to address such security issues as the threat of botnets and malware. The members will also attempt to assure security in cloud computing.
Philippe Courtot, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the cloud security and platform company Qualys, is the founder of the new organization. He pledged $500,000 to help launch the organization. His plan is to leverage talent in member organizations to fund and foster collaborative innovation. In addition to encouraging innovation, the group will focus on collaboration and leveraging the expertise of its members.
The Trustworthy Internet Movement will be recruiting people with domain expertise; innovation and technology leaders; stakeholders; corporations, venture capitalists and angel investors; academic institutions; and other nonprofit organizations.
"With 2 billion people relying on the Internet for much of their personal and business lives, it is incumbent upon the industry to put its collective heads together and resolve the problems of online security, privacy, and reliability once and for all," Courtot said. "We have a unique opportunity with the rapid spread of cloud-based services to leverage the power of the industry and the wider community of Internet users to resolve the issues that are holding back the Internet from fulfilling its true potential."
RSA is the security division of the information technology company EMC Corp.
Western Union Holdings Inc. has been active in the mobile payments arena. It reported that it:
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