Effective July 1st of next year, eBay will no longer allow third party checkout transactions for customers. That means you will only be able to make purchases using eBay-owned PayPal.

eBay claims that only about 10% of purchases made are done by third party options. In the same announcement, the online auction giant tried to throw a little oil on what will surely be turbulant waters as reactions ripple through the web. eBay says it will be upgrading its checkout system with better credit card integration, tax reporting and smoother shipping to places like Alaska and Hawaii. Yeah, yeah....

Speaking of turbulant waters, there's already been some brouhaha over eBay using this to throw Google Checkout out of its sandbox. Just a clarification; Google Checkout was never in the eBay sandbox to begin with.

It's long time until next July, we'll see what the FTC has to say about this between now and then.

Advertising on radio has consistently proven to be an effective and efficient medium to help generate brand awareness and grow business for a variety of companies and in a variety of geographical markets. But for small and mid-sized businesses that are on a tight budget, it pays to know some tricks of the trade to keep radio advertising affordable.

"Negotiation is key. You have to go in and negotiate what you want," says J. T. Hroncich, managing director and principal of Capitol Media Solutions, an agency that helps companies buy advertising. "There's a lot more to it than placing a simple print ad. You have to look at the target audience your looking to reach, size of your budget and the ratings of the stations you are interested in purchasing."

The sections below will detail how to understand your options for radio advertising, tips for negotiating deals for radio ads within…

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Google is working on a social networking solution to compete with Facebook, although when asked if the solution will resemble Facebook, CEO Eric Schmidt said, "The world doesn't need a copy of the same thing." They are talking with top game developers like Playfish and Zynga (the company that brought Farmville to Facebook).

Google already owns Orkut, a social network that enables instant messaging and the sharing of photos and videos, just like Facebook.

If you remember, I previously blogged about four guys who were taking on Facebook with their own solution, Diaspora. Will anyone ever be able to tame the Facebook beast, or are all attempts in vain?

Google is big and smart and rich and Facebook is a UI nightmare, so maybe there's a way for Google…

Venture capital firm Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham sent the VC blogosphere into a tizzy this week when he tweeted:

“Convertible notes have won. Every investment so far in this YC batch (and there have been a lot) has been done on a convertible note.”

At issue for everyone was whether this was 1) true and 2) a good or bad thing.

If you’re interested in the various opinions, I offer up these links:

Fred Wilson, a well-known New York VC: Some Thoughts On Convertible Debt

Foundry Group managing director Seth Levine: Has Convertible Debt Won? And If It Has, Is That a Good Thing?

The Business Insider:

You've probably spent a lot of time and energy building up your business, so now it's time to locate those people who love to shout from the mountain tops how great they think you are. Why? Well eventually you'll want to reach out to these very special people, thank them and treat them extra special.

At my company VerticalResponse, we create a list of advocates from different channels so that when we're ready to really motivate them even more than they already are, we can do it easily. So where do you start?

Your Employees - Your employees can be the very best advocates for your business. You know who your best employees are and those who love what they do. Ask them to talk about your business on Twitter and Facebook if they'd like, and to post that they work for you on LinkedIn.

Best Customers - Look to see who your best customers have been, these are probably people that have purchased from you a number of times. Then based…

Each day, Inc.'s reporters scour the Web for the most important and interesting news to entrepreneurs. Here's what we found today:

Google vs. Facebook: the employee bidding wars are on. Sure seems like a good time to be a developer at Google. According to TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, Google is combatting an increasing number of employee defections to Facebook by offering some astounding perks: in one recent case, Arrington writes, Google offered a developer threatening to leave for Facebook "a 15% raise on his $150,000 mid level developer salary, quadruple the stock benefits and...a $500,000 cash bonus to stay for a year." The most concerning part for Google? "He took the Facebook offer anyway," Arrington writes.

Ten B-School courses not to miss. The

Thirty seconds into one of the insanely popular Twilight films (or a quick look at any Twilight poster) and you know that Taylor Lautner, a.k.a. Jacob Black and the guy whose pecs are usually on display, would win a match of muscle against a mere mortal.

But by challenging Lautner to a push-up contest, the owner of a trailer company just might come out the stronger man – or at least with stronger sales.

The saga began last month, when Lautner started legal proceedings against McMahon's RV of Irvine, California, after a dispute over a customized trailer.

Lautner, 18, was planning to use the custom-painted, upgraded vehicle on the Pittsburgh set of his latest flick, Abduction, this summer, but was unable to relax in his new $300,000 toy, as the…

So, there's Apple's new social network for iTunes called Ping. It was just announced this week and as Steve Jobs himself described it; it's "like Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes."

We all know how this goes. Jobs launched it, so count on Ping to be Webster's newest verb by Friday. (As in, "let me ping you that song" or "what's the name of that new group? Can you ping it to me later?").

But wasn't there already a Ping brand out there? What about the golf brand, Ping?

It turns out, Apple has already cut a deal with the owner of the Ping name in golf. Ping's parent company, Karsten Manufactoring, has even put out a press release blessing Apple's new music endeavor.

Every business owner likes to think that he or she has a commitment to quality. If that were truly the case, of course, no product would ever disappoint, and no service would result in a complaint. So how can you improve quality at your company? Here are 5 steps you can take to put you on the right path.

1. Make a commitment.

W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, famously laid out 14 points for management—chief among them, the notion of "constancy of purpose."

Deming argued that a company's commitment to quality had to come from the top, and it had to be reinforced over and over again. Unless a business views quality as its single, non-negotiable goal, workers will inevitably feel the need to make tradeoffs and quality will slip.

"Constancy of purpose means that quality decisions are not…