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Pop quiz: The Political Action Committee for which of the following companies has given the most in donations to lawmakers who have co-sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate-counterpart, the Protect IP Act: Microsoft, eBay, Google, GoDaddy, Yahoo! or Amazon?

Think carefully: all six have come out in opposition to the bill, which would put tight restrictions on Internet firms in an effort to enforce U.S. copyright laws (although some firms took more convincing stands than others). At least two of the companies, Google and Amazon, have said they may go dark to protest the bill.

If you guessed GoDaddy, which had a public dust up after initially supporting SOPA, you're right. Sort of. GoDaddy's PAC leads in percentage, giving 52.9% of the $38,750 it has given during this election cycle to Representatives that have signed on to co-sponsor SOPA and Senators who are co-sponsoring PIPA.

Several of the largest Interent firms - including Google, Facebook and Twitter - are backing alternate legislation being proposed to the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts.

The OPEN act sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., would allow the International Trade Commission to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties withe foreign websites that are targeted by patent infringement claims.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, on the other hand, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

Every ecommerce site needs to customize and personalize products for fast-moving Internet consumers. eBay is no stranger to this. In a quest to further personalize its recommendations, today eBay acquired Hunch.com. It will use the new technology to ramp up its ecommerce recommendations, including predictive merchandising, interpreting unstructured data and creating merchant insights. Personalization is a hot trend on the Internet. It is found on sites ranging from daily deals Google Offers and Groupon to social reading apps like Zite and Flipboard.

PayPal and eBay really want you to know that it is a player in the mobile payments realm. Especially with the holidays coming up and more consumers than ever expected to make purchases from mobile devices. PayPal believes there is a lot of horizontal movement to be made in the mobile payments space and with the power of eBay behind it, the company thinks it will be the leader in the ecosystem for years to come.

PayPal and eBay have come out with new infographics today to show just how well the companies are doing in the mobile realm. It is really kind of ostentatious actually. PayPal specifically realizes that it has lost a lot of the consumer mindshare in mobile payments with everybody talking about how NFC may or may not change how payments fundamentally work. Check out the stats and infographics below.

DailyDeals.com offers a slightly new twist on the increasingly played out daily deals concept, offering consumers discounts from online-only vendors like Zazzle.com and Novica.com. DailyDeals.com's CEO Steve Schaffer wants to take advantage of online-only daily deals by integrating them with social commerce. Just because a consumer's friends online are doing it doesn't mean they're going to do it with them, online. 

At yesterday's PayPal Innovate conference in San Francisco, EBay and Facebook announced a partnership to integrate Open Graph into EBay's commerce platforms X.commerce, Magnto and GSI. Merchants already have the ability to set-up shop on Facebook and sell directly to people who Like their pages, but that feature - like many other social commerce ideas on Facebook - never did take off. Facebook's EBay integration might be the tipping point for social commerce - not only will merchants be able to integrate new "want" and "own" buttons, but advertisers will soon be able to target users based on their Open Graph activity.

"Communications is at the heart of ecommerce and community. By combining the two leading ecommerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in Internet voice communications," announced eBay's CEO in September 2005, Meg Whitman, "we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the Net."

By 2005, what Meg Whitman had learned about "ecosystems," such as they are, would have had to have come from her tenure as president of Stride Rite Shoes, the maker of Keds; and later as chief of Hasbro's Playskool division, where she directly oversaw the marketing of Mr. Potato Head. Inspired by the reintroduction of the toy brand into popular culture with Pixar's Toy Story, Whitman's innovations included the licensing of the brand to television, leading to the 1998 premiere of Fox Kids' "The Mr. Potato Head Show."

With today's announcement that Meg Whitman will become the next CEO of HP, it is time to a look at where she has come from and what challenges are ahead for the computer company. Certainly, in its 72-year history, the fortunes of HP have never been more at risk than they are now.

eBay history

Meg Whitman served as President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay from 1998 to 2008. Those were the go-go years for the online auction house. When she started they had just 30 employees. She grew it to 15,000 employees and $8B in revenue. eBay also bought Skype, selling it for about half of what they paid. Other notable eBay purchases during the Whitman era included Half.com, Paypal, Shopping.com and StubHub.

By now the use of phones as the second factor in a security solution is well known and there are any number of vendors operating in this space. Even Google and Facebook have added this to their services, as we wrote about earlier this summer.

Today, eBay announced that it has purchased mobile payments company Zong for $240 million, to integrate into PayPal.

By buying Zong, eBay is attempting to position PayPal to be a leader in mobile payments for the years to come. Mobile payments are expected to be a $670 billion industry by 2015 according to report from Juniper Research. Zong is a middleman connection between merchants and telephone companies that allows users to make mobile purchases with carrier billing. Can Zong keep PayPal relevant in the mobile payment arms race that includes Google, Square, Verifone and many others?