Today I spotted something that has been around for a few months but I never noticed - PayPal have begun offering near instant withdrawal of funds via the FPS (Fafter Payments Service) in the UK. I had put in multiple feature requests for this over the latest year and am pleased it has now happened.

For those of you who don't know, in the UK, we have a system called BACS (Bankers' Automated Clearing Services) for sending funds between bank accounts electronically without using Cheques. This system was annoying as it took 3 days for payments to arrive in the bank of the person the funds were being sent to. The alternative was CHAPS (Clearing House Automated Payment System) which, while not instant, arrived in the account the same day if done before 3pm. This service costs £25 to £35 per payment depending on the bank, is only available during weekdays and generally requires you to fill in payment forms at a bank branch to do. FPS was created to remove the delay and eventually replace BACS. The majority of banks now send payments between banks via FPS without any additional charge.

Some good news for those looking forward to 4G technologies being rolled out and the increased coverage and faster speeds it will bring. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) in the USA today has created a new "shot clock" rule that will make it a requirement for all requests to add equipment to existing cell sites to be approved within 90 days and 150 for applications for new cell sites. Currently, the process can take anywhere up to a year which greatly increases the cost of setting up the cell site.

There had been media speculation that the requirement to even put in a request for additional equipment on an existing cell site would be removed but it looks like the FCC stopped short of doing this which is a shame as generally, the majority of these requests get approved anyway unlike applications for new cell sites.

For a long while I have been considering building a computer for inside my car being somebody who likes to fiddle with the latest technology.

Car Computers are not a new thing and have been around since the 90s in various forms but have really become popular in the last 4-5 years with smaller motherboards such as the Mini-ITX small size low power form factor becoming available.

The main advantage of building a Car Computer is that you can combine a lot of things such as music stored on the computer's disk drive, satellite navigation, phone hands free, an email client that reads out your email as you drive, etc all into the one unit.

A little more than two years after the previous strikes, we are now on the first day of another Royal Mail postal strike which appears to focus on the same issues that the previous strike did.

Because of my involvement in Its Elixir, a skin and hair care products business, postal strikes create a lot of problems as the majority of items are sent out via this this method. We are having to repeat what we did in the previous strike and drop the price of courier deliver, at a cost to the business, to encourage people to use this method instead if they are in need of their products quickly.

The strike focuses on the modernisation plan Royal Mail have had for a few years. This involves the purchase of walk sequencing machines that organises mail into the order the postman will deliver them on his or her round. You can understand why this sort of thing needs to be implemented as its bread and butter business of delivering letters is falling year on year. Previously, all this work would be done manually so the union has been concerned about job losses but this cannot be a reason they choose not to implement it.

Well, its official. T-Mobile (the company I have business mobile contracts for a few businesses I am involved with) and Orange have decided to merge operations within the UK.

T-Mobile has had the "For Sale" sign on its UK operation for a few months now to reduce debt at the parent company - Deutsche Telekom. Both O2 and Vodafone had shown some interest based on media speculation but in the end they have opted for a deal which will see a new company in the UK created - the name of which has not yet been announced (although The Register appear to like T-Orange) - and both Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom (Orange UK's parent company) getting a 50% stake each. Both the T-Mobile and Orange brands will stay for at least 18 months but after that we will most likely see these phased out and replaced with a single new name. During the next 18 months, through, back office staff will be merged within the company with the aim of cost cutting and removing duplication.

Today, Cool App Lab (part of my company - Craig Brass Systems) has released BlackBerry Ticket Client for Kayako SupportSuite / eSupport.

Kayako produce Help Desk software offering both functionality to allow you to track Tickets as well as Live Chat functionality.

Several years ago, the UK led the way in cutting fraud for cardholder present transactions by introducing EMV which many of you will know as "Chip and Pin". After phasing out the swiping of cards with customers signing for transactions and requiring people to use their PIN to confirm a transaction, fraud was cut overnight. Sadly it wasn't a total success as although we stopped fraud over in the UK, fraud of UK cards moved abroad. This is because outside the UK, not all countries have rolled out EMV even to this day. On the plus side, as these countries roll out EMV, we will become even more protected.

Separately, in cardholder not present transactions, for many years now, we have been trying to combat both credit / debit card fraud (both online and over the phone transactions) and online banking fraud.

As some of you may know, I own a software development company and we have been busy working away to build our first piece of software - a fully featured Shopping Cart / eCommerce solution. This was started after getting annoyed with existing solutions on the market and wanting a solution where everything was included out of the box.

I am now pleased to say that this morning, after 2 years of development, we have now launched Viper Cart on the Its Elixir (a skin and hair care products business I am also involved with) website. This is in alpha form with a few features missing including a fully functional administration area but everything that does work is fairly stable. We spent a lot of time testing to make sure of this.

There has been 8 orders through the system since we set it live so it is obviously working as intended.

Time to start blogging again I think. I did previously have a blog several years ago but when switching between servers, I never set it back up again.

The designer I use for websites I build was really late with a design so ended up throwing in this site design free of charge. I think it looks rather good.