Popular online market place, eBay has updated its official app for Android to add selling function. This allows users to list, relist or revise their listing of stuff they want to sell.

Using your Android-powered device, you can list an item and even include up to eight photos. What’s more, this new updated app supports RedLaser’s barcode scanning technology to prefill item details for an array of products.

There are other options like revise items from your “Active Selling” list, relist them from the “Unsold” list, “Sell one like this” capability (when viewing a similar item on eBay), as well as the ability to schedule an auction (start immediately or choose a later date), end an active auction, mark an item as shipped, and contact the buyer right from within the app.

In addition, eBay for Android has a new home screen, which has more options for refining search results (condition, free shipping, location, completed listings and sold items only). Besides, the home screen now also shows feedback ratings and recent comments from eBay members.

The online shopping portal has also done a lot of changes under the hood – fixing a number of bugs and bringing performance improvements.

Eko is a low cost mobile banking solution for people in the low income groups. It is just the right service for India, where the workforce is 540 million-strong. Only about six per cent of these workers are employed in the organized sectors. The low cost mobile banking company Eko aims to serve the unorganized segments of our economy.

Eko was founded in 2009 with the aim to reduce the cost of financial transactions. The reason? The bigger banks used to target only higher income group customers due to more earnings from them. Eko decided to reach out to low income group customers through mobile phones to deliver banking services to them.

Almost at the same time a regulation was made by the Reserve Bank of India, which said non-profit companies could only become business correspondents for regular banks, and that retail outlets such as grocery stores and petrol pumps could work as sub-agents of these business correspondents (BCs). These regulations allow SBI and Eko to work together to allow customers to open zero-balance accounts. Customers can save money in these zero-balance bank accounts and earn an interest rate of 2 to 3 per cent per annum on their savings.&#151 all the banking activities such as deposit, withdrawals, remittance and checking balance can be done through SMS.

Low income group customers just have to approach local retail stores that are sub-agents of Eko with their identity proof, a photograph and of course, a personal mobile phone. Eko has managed to reach its target audience easily by collaborating with local retail stores, which are in direct touch with the customers.

Mugdha Bhargava, vice president of communication, Eko, said, “We plan to cover Bihar, Jharkhand and Delhi for the next six months and then move to other parts like UP and Maharashtra.” She said there was no referral system in place right now and that the company targeted the customers through various activities like nukkad natak, promoter-led and van activities, financial literacy comics etc. The company had plans to associate with banks other than SBI and ICICI Bank, but details were not given.

According to another official from the company, Eko is currently present in Delhi NCR region and Bihar-Jharkhand region, which are full of migrant workers. Eko currently engages about 1,300 CSPs (customer service points) or retail outlets to serve customers. These retail outlets are chosen on the basis of certain risk parameters like criminal record, identity proof, shop address proof, and business details like footfall, cash management capabilities, goodwill in the market etc.

These retail stores work like mini bankers for low income group customers who otherwise have no access to banking services. The transactions are kept secure with the help of unique and secret PIN numbers.

Eko has also entered into a partnership with VeriSign to make sure that transactions are kept secure. The details of the transactions conducted are also sent to the customer in the form of an SMS.

Rovio Mobile has announced a new version of the popular mobile game, the Angry Birds, for this summer season. Titled as “Summer Pignic”, the game tries to give its users a perfect treat in this summer by bringing in quite a few new levels and a whole lot of fun into the game.

In earlier versions, players used to get a bunch of birds to play with but with this new update, the users will just get a single bird to play with.

Details of the game have not been officially declared by the developer but with the teaser video, which has been released recently, it seems so.

The Angry Birds Summer Pignic will be available for Android, iOS, Mac and PC platform to begin with, which could be followed by more versions for Windows Phone 7, Symbian and Palm OS as well.

Panini virtual keypad, which helps people type messages in Hindi and other Indian regional languages, is set to debut on Android phones.

Noida-based startup Luna Egronomics launched Panini virtual keypad for nine regional Indian languages some two years ago as a paid application for Java based Nokia phones and other phones with multitap keys.

The Panini virtual keypad has been widely regarded as a big step in making local language support practical for people. Till now, people needed to type in English to get a word in Hindi or any other regional language. For example, if one wanted to write grape in Hindi, he or she had to type ‘angoor’ in English, which is not really comfortable for a person who is not well-versed in English.

What Panini does is to display on a virtual keypad the letters on the physical keypad that correspond to letters in Hindi (or any other language), making it possible for people to type in regional languages.

Abhijit Bhattacharjee, chief executive officer of Luna Egronomics, told ‘The Mobile Indian’, “We will soon launch our app for Android, and the best part is that the keypad will be usable across all applications, making it possible for it to be the default keypad of the phone.”

He also said, “Right now the application has to be downloaded by the user, while we are trying to get partnerships to pre-install the application in the phones. We have already signed agreements with players like Micromax and Spice. It is a matter of time before we start seeing the keypad on these devices.”

The company is a winner of the 2011 TiE50 world award, which is given to each of the 50 top technology startups of the world. It also won a Nokia innovations award in 2009, as well as several other awards.

“This is the way people will type in the future,” an upbeat Abhijit said adding that “it is not just for regional languages of the world. Even for English we are developing a Predictive text input system, which is not dictionary based but is use based so that commonly used words from around the world are included in our database and will help you type faster.”

The app supports typing in 11 Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi and Assamese.
Users can download the application from here, and can check whether their phone is compatible with the app here.