Stripe Comes to the UK

Payment company Stripe is expanding across the pond into the United Kingdom today. Stripe now supports two new currencies, the British pound, and the euro. Stripe is a direct competitor to PayPal, Braintree, and others. Stripe has won over a lot of developers due to that all you need to do to implement Stripe is insert a couple lines of code.

The service has been in beta in the UK since March, and it is still in beta for Ireland, France, and the Netherlands. Virgin Pure and Thread.com have been using the beta.

Stripe is definitely looking out on the rest of Europe and Australia to expand in the future.

Vodafone to Launch 4G LTE in the UK on August 29

Vodafone UK, a very popular mobile phone provider, has just announced that it will start to rollout 4G on August 29, with London going first. Twelve more cities will be online before the end of the year including Birmingham, Edinburgh, Leeds and Sheffield, and other listed below. Pricing will begin at £26 a month, which will come with a SIM card and 2GB of data. The operator also has a large selection of hardware to choose from, such as the Nokia 925, the Galaxy S4, and the Blackberry Z10. Although the 4G network will not go live until the end of the month, customers can begin to sign up for the service starting on August 12 either in store or online. Customers who already have an LTE handset will be able to upgrade to a 4G plan for an extra £5 a month. To try an win over some O2 customers, Vodafone is throwing unlimited data for the first three months, along with either a Spotify premium subscription or a Premiership football content bundle. Even though the UK has always had some LTE, this year looks like it the Year of the Rollout. O2 is releasing, and EE is already running. The UK now actually has competition in terms of 4G LTE service.

Full list of cities: Birmingham, Bradford, Coventry, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield.

Facebook Home is Now International

Facebook Home is now available for download in Canada and the United Kingdom in Google Play. Facebook does however still keep the number of phones even eligible to use the Home service very limited. The HTC First is still an AT&T special, and  other carriers across the pond in the UK and in Canada carry the four other phones that Facebook Home can be installed on. The Home phones are: the HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III and Samsung Galaxy Note II.