A savvy move for Amex, too. Though Revolution competes against entrenched credit-card companies and PayPal, among others, its alternative payment system, which reduces costs for accepting credit cards by up to 75 percent, is quite attractive to merchants who’ve shouldered those costs for so long.

Says JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan: “While it is hard to know precisely what direction AmEx plans to take the Revolution assets, we think the acquisition suggests the company is trying to be more aggressive in the online payments arena. We think PayPal’s existing account base and international footprint have given it a network advantage in the C2C space that is hard to dislodge. On the other hand, we believe significant room exists for market share gains in Online Payments by companies that offer innovative solutions, and this acquisition gives Revolution Money a stronger backer.”

The online auctioneer reported revenue of $2.23 billion, up six percent from a year ago, while net income fell 29 percent to $350 million or 27 cents per share. Excluding some items, earnings were 38 cents a share. Analysts who follow eBay expected the company to turn in a gain of 37 cents per share on sales of $2.14 billion.

Gross merchandise volume–the value of all goods sold via eBay–rose seven percent from the same period last year. Analysts had believed it would drop between five and 10 percent.

EBay said it sees fourth-quarter earnings of 38 cents to 40 cents a share, on revenue of $2.2 billion to $2.3 billion.

“Our third quarter results were strong, with PayPal gaining momentum and market share worldwide and our core eBay business showing positive trends,” John J. Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, said in a statement.

NOTES FROM THE EARNINGS CALL

On business overall:
eBay CEO John Donahoe: “These are strong results for a strong company….We’re seeing our turnaround efforts begin to pay off.”

On the economy:
Donahoe: “The economy as we see it is stable, and we’re cautiously optimistic about consumer spending going into the holiday.”

On the Skype lawsuit:
eBay CFO Bob Swan: “We’re highly confident in our position.”

In the interest of public safety, of course. Among those browsers, older versions of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer and Firefox and, presumably, all versions of Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser that PayPal recently cautioned users against. “Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do to protect their customers,” Barrett said this past February. “Our recommendation at this point, to our customers, is use Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out or Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, or indeed Opera.”

UPDATE: PayPal now says it never planned to block Safari.

PayPal is developing features to block customers from logging in to PayPal when using obsolete browsers on outdated or unsupported operating systems. An example of such a browser/OS combination might be, for example, Internet Explorer 4 running on Windows 98. In doing so, we better protect our customers from viewing a phishing site through their browser. We have absolutely no intention of blocking current versions of any browsers, including Apple’s Safari, from our Web site.”

So to recap:

• PayPal Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett warns against using Safari.

• PayPal publishes a paper, authored by Barrett, saying the company will soon protect users against unsafe browsers that lack phishing protections like blacklists, anti-fraud warning pages and Extended Validation SSL Certificates.
• Safari lacks these protections.
• PayPal says: Go ahead and use Safari. We have absolutely no intention of blocking it. But God forbid, don’t use IE4 on Windows 98.

Know what IE4’s share of the browser market was in 2007?

0.01%.

I’d imagine its share of the market on Windows 98 machines in 2008 is quite a bit less than that. You might as well warn against using IE4 on MS-DOS.

But I suspect it’s going to take quite a bit more than that to unseat institutions like Visa and MasterCard, even with merchant fees of just 0.5%.

Google’s current engineering facilities in the United States, India and Switzerland are all leaders in search technology development. However, by locating a research and technology center on the moon, Google engineers will be able to experiment with an entirely different set of parameters. For example, imagine tapping unlimited solar energy to drive megawatt data centers and power innumerable arrays of massively parallel lava lamps, with ample no-cost cooling available to regulate the temperature of server farms sprawling over acres of land unblighted by sentient lifeforms or restrictive zoning ordinances.”

–Excerpt from “Google Copernicus Center Is Hiring,” the company’s 2004 April Fool’s Day hoax

With the establishment of the Google Lunar X Prize, Google’s 2004 Copernicus Center announcement seems less April Fool’s Day hoax, more company aspiration. At Wired NextFest in Los Angeles yesterday, Google said it will award up to $30 million in prize money to anyone able to land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon.

To win the purse, the lunar craft must travel the lunar surface to a distance of at least 1,640 feet and relay video, images and data back to Earth. And it must do so by the end of 2012.

“We are confident that teams from around the world will help develop new robotic and virtual-presence technology, which will dramatically reduce the cost of space exploration,” said Peter Diamandis, head of the X Prize Foundation–the nonprofit institute working with Google on this effort. “Moon 2.0, the second era of lunar exploration, will not be a quest for ‘flags and footprints.’ This time we will go to the moon to stay. The moon is a stepping stone to the rest of the solar system and a source of solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on Earth–energy independence and climate change.”

That seems a noble goal. Question is: is it an attainable one? There are plenty of skeptics who claim it’s not. “It’s hard to imagine this project costing less than a few hundred million dollars; PayPal billionaire Elon Musk, so far the most accomplished of the ‘new space’ entrepreneurs, has pumped an estimated $100 million into his Falcon 1 launch vehicle [and] still hasn’t reached orbit,” says Popular Mechanics air and space correspondent David Noland. “Against that kind of financial investment, $20 million is a drop in the bucket. A prize-winner would have to come up with millions upon millions on his own. Anyone who can come up with that kind of money would probably want to make up his own rules, not follow Google’s.”