Paypal

EBay Inc., the online auction house, will start collecting a fee to manage money deposited in its PayPal Money Market Fund, the San Jose-based company said. PayPal, an electronic payment service with some 87 million customers in more than 40 countries, sweeps funds that customers keep in their accounts into the money market fund. The company pays a seven-day average yield of 4.38% on money in those accounts.

A federal prosecutor has accused EBay Inc.'s PayPal subsidiary of violating the law when it facilitated online gambling payments last year, according to EBay documents filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In a letter sent to the San Jose online auction firm Friday, U.S. Atty. Ray Gruender of St. Louis argued that PayPal violated a 17-month-old federal anti-terrorism law when it handled payments for online casinos.

Google Inc.'s chief executive Tuesday denied reports that the online search engine leader was gearing up to compete directly with EBay Inc.'s pioneering PayPal service, but acknowledged some kind of electronic payment product was in the works. Eric Schmidt did not give details about the project but said it wouldn't trespass on PayPal's turf. "We do not intend to offer a person-to-person, stored-value payments system," Schmidt said.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and a "super PAC" working on his behalf spent more than twice as much as they raised in January, underscoring how persistent challenges by rivals Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have taxed the former Massachusetts governor's financial operation. In a month when Romney lost two of the four GOP primary contests, his campaign raced through $18.7 million while raising just $6.4 million, according to finance records filed Monday with the Federal Election Commission.

The first time my daughter went overseas with her college classmates, I called our cellphone company to inquire about international connection plans. For just $6 a month, they told me, I could get "discounted" calls to wherever my daughter traveled. Some $200 in "discounted" calling charges later — which added up to less than two hours of phone time — I realized that what I bought was an expensive lesson on international dialing. I've since learned that keeping in touch with friends and relatives overseas can be cheap — sometimes even free — but you may need to learn how to talk into your computer screen.

After her breast cancer diagnosis in December, Ederlen Casillas of Downey found herself overcome by more than just her cancer treatments. "Trying to communicate with family and friends was starting to feel overwhelming," she says. "It's an emotional topic, and discussing it repeatedly can be exhausting. Sometimes you really can't communicate as clearly as you want to." At her cousin's suggestion, Casillas set up a Web page with Caring Bridge, a nonprofit organization that provides free websites for people facing a serious illness.

PayPal recently made a significant digital purchase of its own. The mobile-payment service provider, which is owned by eBay, acquired card.io, a San Francisco start-up that enables users to use a smartphone camera to scan in their credit card information, according to a company blog post on Tuesday. The two companies first connected while working on integrating the card.io technology into the PayPal Here app, according to the PayPal blog post . "While working with them, we were simply blown away by the creativity and drive of their employees," wrote Hill Ferguson, PayPal vice president of global product.

Starting next year, PayPal users will be able to use their online payment accounts to shop in more than 7 million physical stores nationwide, because of a new partnership between owner Ebay Inc. and credit card company Discover Financial Services. PayPal will begin issuing cards in the second quarter of 2013 that are hooked into the accounts of the service's more than 50 million active users. Customers can then make purchases from merchants connected to Discover's network, using PayPal as they would cash, checks and credit cards.

As Facebook shoots toward a $100-billion initial public stock offering, the race is already on to find the next Facebook. And the smart money in Silicon Valley is betting one group has the inside track: Facebook's early employees. While building the world's largest social network, they built a social network of their own. Now that they have parted company with Facebook to seek their own fortunes, they have a competitive edge: each other. These ambitious young entrepreneurs call on one another for money and advice, sit on each other's boards and hook up to celebrate birthdays and weddings.

Despite the long holiday break, hackers kept up their attacks, targeting Apple Inc. and Fox News before hacking PayPal Inc. on Tuesday in the latest rash of cyber strikes. As America celebrated its independence, hackers took control of Fox News' Twitter account and early Monday morning tweeted six messages to @foxnewspolitics' 34,000 followers stating that the president had been killed, according to Fox News. The tweets, which were noticed about 2 a.m., were deleted after Twitter suspended the account about seven hours later and returned control of it to Fox News.