The service is being introduced jointly by Orange, Bouygues Telecom and SFR, in conjunction with computer services group Atos Origin. The service will be called Buyster and is likely to be introduced in France by summer this year.

www.buyster.fr

Buyster will allow users to make payments for purchases made online, by linking their mobile phone to a bank card. The new service will be based on the same Near Field Communication (NFC) technology that Orange is using for mobile payments in the UK. Users will be able to just wave or touch their mobile phones against an in-store reader to make a payment.

Mobile operator Orange estimates that the service will soon be made available to more than 50 million users. French online retailers are extremely happy with the news of this service, as the convenience it will provide can only help to improve business.

Laurent Bailly, head of marketing at Buyster, said that the service will later be extended across Europe. However, many observers are raising doubts about the possibility of the success of the service outside of France.

This feat was accomplished with the help of some 4,000 users of Facebook who gave various suggestions to translate the program into French. They eventually voted for the best translation. The same strategy was used to launch the German and Spanish versions of Facebook.

Facebook was launched in 2004, by a young entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg from Harvard as a social networking site for students of the college, from where it spread to other colleges and then into the workplace in general. Facebook claims to have accumulated 67 million users in this short span of time, of which about 1.4 million live in France.

Users can now choose any of the four languages in which the site is available, through a drop down menu to display their homepage. However it should be noted that as of now, the different applications, games, software nuggets etc. are available only in English.

Over 1,30,000 users greeted the launch of the French version with enthusiasm. Some users, however, are not satisfied with the program, as Facebook has only gone halfway with the translation.

The majority of Facebook users now live outside the U.S; with about a third based in Europe. According to Facebook, France is the 6th largest community on their website. Facebook has been steadily eating into the market share of the current social networking leader, MySpace, which was started in 2003 and then acquired by Rupert Murdoch. MySpace claims to have 110 million users.

According to Forbes magazine, Zuckerberg, who is only 23, is the youngest ever self-made billionaire. Last year Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, which means its net worth, is $15 billion. Last month Facebook hired Sheryl Sandberg of Google to boost their previous year’s turnover of $150 million in order to make the investment worth it for Microsoft. Zuckerberg says, “the foreign language sites are a part of a larger effort at Facebook to create web communication tools capable of spurring social change.”

Facebook (French)

In order to achieve this goal, Facebook has started a new application called ‘translator’ and they have asked users in local networks to volunteer some of their time to help this endavour. At present French, Spanish and German language versions are underway. Venturebeat reports that thousands of users have already started work on this project. Facebook seems to be saving a lot of revenue by asking its users to volunteer for this work.

Facebook Translations Application

To achieve the best possible results, Facebook has also installed a voting system, whereby other users can give their opinion on the quality of translation used and can immediately point out grammatical errors. These translations will be available only for Facebook-generated text and not for personal entries made by users.

The French German and Spanish versions are expected to be ready by the end of March 2008. Facebook will then decide whether to use this method going forward, and if so, which other languages are to be included. The decision to go international seems to be a recent one as they had no particular plans of doing so in August 2007.