Google Wallet Rings Up Visa, Amex, Discover as Partners

By: Clint Boulton

2011-09-20

Google Wallet makes its summer deadline, launching in New York and San Francisco to let consumers pay by phone from Sprint's Samsung Nexus S 4G handsets.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) met its self-imposed goal to launch its mobile payment service this summer, as Google Wallet rolled out Sept. 19 to allow consumers in New York and San Francisco pay retailers with their mobile phones.

The launch came with a surprise bonus: Visa, American Express and Discover have joined Citi and MasterCard as credit card partners.

Unveiled in Google's New York office in May, Google Wallet includes a mobile application that communicates with smartphones equipped with near field communications (NFC), a short distance wireless technology.

Sprint Nexus S 4G phone owners will receive access to the Wallet through an over-the-air update. Once they receive the app, Nexus S 4G owners can tap their phones against an NFC-enabled cash register to pay for goods at some 20 retailers and restaurants.

Google Wallet will initially support Citi MasterCard and a Google Prepaid Card,  which can be funded with existing plastic credit cards and used at any of the 300,000 stores worldwide that accept MasterCard PayPass. Google is offering a $10 bonus credit to users who set up the Google Prepaid Card in Google Wallet before the end of 2011.

Visa, American Express and Discover have also pledged to enable their cards to support the service in the future, Osama Bedier, Google's vice president of payments, said in a blog post.

Visa also said Google has licensed for payWave contactless payment software, the card provider's answer to MasterCard PayPass, at hundreds of thousands of cash registers all over the world. This deal will enable Visa account holders to make purchases using Wallet.

"Our goal is to make it possible for you to add all of your payment cards to Google Wallet, so you can say goodbye to even the biggest traditional wallets," Bedier said, adding the Wallet would be available on more phones in the future.

Read early reviews of Wallet from The Verge andGigaOm blogs.

Wallet stands at the vanguard of a number of emerging mobile payments solutions, including those from Square and PayPal, as well as Isis, the mobile payment triumvirate formed by AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile. Isis won't launch until 2012, but it will do so with support from all of the major credit card providers.

One of the challenges Wallet and all of its erstwhile rivals will have is selling the consumer on the notion of mobile payments via smartphones. There is no proof that consumers will embrace such technology after shoppers have spent the last several decades using plastic cards they simply swipe at checkout.

Moreover, Google developed its latest Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" operating system with NFC technology, the Nexus S 4G is currently the only equipped with a special NFC chip to securely store users' credit card data. And Google only has about 20 retail partners, including Macy's, CVS and American Eagle, where users can use Wallet.

Google believes it has the advantage of incentive with Google Offers, the company's Groupon clone service that entices consumers with discounts of 50 percent off or more for goods and services. Offers is live in three dozen cities around the country, including in San Francisco and New York, where Wallet is now available.

Deal aggregator Yipit claims Offers has suffered declines versus rivals Groupon and LivingSocial of late. However, a Google spokesperson said the company is pleased with Offers so far.

Facebook Teams up with Twitter; Danger for Google+?

By IB Times Staff Reporter | September 18, 2011 8:50 AM EDT

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” This is, currently, the motto of both Facebook and Twitter as both of them have joined forces for a better social networking experience. Could this spell doom for Google+?

Facebook, which currently has over 750 million active users, will now allow users to update Twitter accounts on their Facebook platform. This new feature will enable the Facebook user account to update the twitter account, which is linked, with every update from Facebook.

The new feature will allow users post updates on both Facebook and Twitter at the same time, and will provide more content to Twitter. Facebook, now, will also be updating Twitter feeds. To start, the user needs to go to facebook.com/twitter and link the profile page to the twitter account.

Like us on Facebook

This may or may not prove to be a danger sign for Google+ which is competing against both Facebook and Twitter, according to a PC Magazine report.

Twitter, currently, as compared to Facebook has only 100 million active users and many of the users rarely access Twitter.

Follow us on LinkedIn  LinkedIn

News From Partners
Also read: Refinancing Tips: What You Need to Know to Snag Today's Rock-Bottom Rates
Also read: Will J.Lo and Marc Anthony Fashions Top the Charts for Kohl's?

Google Details, and Defends, Its Use of Electricity

Google disclosed Thursday that it continuously uses enough electricity to power 200,000 homes, but it says that in doing so, it also makes the planet greener.

Every time a person runs a Google search, watches a YouTube video or sends a message through Gmail, the company’s data centers full of computers use electricity. Those data centers around the world continuously draw almost 260 million watts — about a quarter of the output of a nuclear power plant.

Up to now, the company has kept statistics about its energy use secret. Industry analysts speculate it was because the information was embarrassing and would also give competitors a clue to how Google runs its operations.

While the electricity figures may seem large, the company asserts that the world is a greener place because people use less energy as a result of the billions of operations carried out in Google data centers. Google says people should consider things like the amount of gasoline saved when someone conducts a Google search rather than, say, drives to the library. “They look big in the small context,” Urs Hoelzle, Google’s senior vice president for technical infrastructure, said in an interview.

Google says that people conduct over a billion searches a day and numerous other downloads and queries. But when it calculates that average energy consumption on the level of a typical user the amount is small, about 180 watt-hours a month, or the equivalent of running a 60-watt light bulb for three hours. The overall electricity figure includes all Google operations worldwide, like the energy required to run its campuses and office parks, Mr. Hoelzle added. Data centers, however, account for most of it.

For years, Google maintained a wall of silence worthy of a government security agency on how much electricity the company used — a silence that experts speculated was used to cloak how quickly it was outstripping the competition in the scale and efficiency of its data centers.

The electricity figures are no longer seen as a key to decoding the company’s operations, Mr. Hoelzle said.

Unlike many data-driven companies, Google designs and builds most of its data centers from scratch, down to the servers using energy-saving chips and software.

Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco, applauded Google for releasing the figures but cautioned that despite the advent of increasingly powerful and energy-efficient computing tools, electricity use at data centers was still rising because every major corporation now relied on them. He said the figures did not include the electricity drawn by the personal computers, tablets and iPhones that use information from Google.

“When we hit the Google search button,” Mr. Horowitz said, “it’s not for free.”

Google also estimated that its total carbon emissions for 2010 were just under 1.5 million metric tons, with most of that attributable to carbon fuels that provide electricity for the data centers. In part because of special arrangements the company has made to buy electricity from wind farms, Google says that 25 percent of its energy was supplied by renewable fuels in 2010, and estimates that figure will reach 30 percent in 2011.

Google also released an estimate that an average search uses 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, a figure that may be difficult to understand intuitively. But when multiplied by Google’s estimate of more than a billion searches a day, the figure yields a somewhat surprising result: about 12.5 million watts of Google’s 260-million-watt total can be accounted for by searches, the company’s bread-and-butter service.

The rest is used by Google’s other services, including YouTube, whose power consumption the company also depicted as very small.

The announcement is likely to spur further competition in an industry where every company is already striving to appear “greener” than the next, said Dennis Symanski, a senior data center project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit organization. At professional conferences on the topic, Mr. Symanski said, “they’re all clamoring to get on the podium to claim that they have the most efficient data center.”

Regulators Raid Google Seoul Office

By KYONG-AE CHOI

SEOUL—The Korean Fair Trade Commission raided the Seoul office of Google Inc. in connection with allegations of unfair trade in South Korea's mobile-search-engine market, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said, the latest in a series of probes into Google's operations globally.

Tuesday's raid was part of an investigation by the antitrust regulator into accusations by Korean portal operators NHN Corp. and Daum Communications Corp. that Google is limiting their access to smartphones using the Android operating system.

The person familiar with the matter declined to provide further details of the raid.

Google has faced a series of investigations in South Korea in recent months that have mainly focused on allegations of the collection of private information. Regulators around the world and several U.S. state attorneys general are also investigating possible privacy breaches by Google. They are focusing on whether Google street-mapping teams collected and stored passwords, emails and other personal information collected from unprotected wireless Internet networks around the world.

The latest allegation in South Korea takes aim at the Google search engine on Android phones. Daum and NHN say the U.S. Internet company is restricting local mobile-service-providers and Android smartphone manufacturers from preloading some search portals on smartphones. The Korean search portals say this makes it inconvenient for users to switch to a different search window, and thus provides Google with a competitive advantage.

"It does not allow fair competition among search engines if Android-based smartphone users come across Google Search whenever they touch the search engine icon, whether they want it or not," a spokesman for NHN said.

Google declined to confirm the raid but said it would cooperate with the investigation.

"We will work with the KFTC to address any questions they may have about our business," a Google spokesman said in a statement.

"Android is an open platform, and carrier and OEM [original equipment manufacturer] partners are free to decide which applications and services to include on their Android phones. We do not require carriers or manufacturers to include Google Search or Google applications on Android-powered devices," the spokesman said.

NHN's Naver is South Korea's dominant Internet portal. As of January, Naver accounted for 52% of South Korea's mobile-search-engine market, followed by Google's 16% and Daum's 15%, according to South Korean market research company Matrix Mobile Index.

In May, South Korean police raided Google's Seoul office following allegations that Google's AdMob platform was used to illegally collect private data about users' geographical locations. In August 2010 the National Police Agency launched an investigation into whether Google collected and stored private information illegally while it prepared for the South Korean launch of its street-mapping service.

Both investigations remain open but the Korea Communications Commission told both Apple Inc. and Google's Korean units last month to prevent the saving of the locations of handset users without data encryption.

Separately, Chinese regulators renewed a key license for Google, suggesting that authorities continue to accept the way the company has restructured its local operations to stop censoring its own Chinese-language search results. Visitors to Google's Chinese search site in China are currently routed to the company's Hong Kong-based site.

—Loretta Chao in Beijing contributed to this article.

Apple Is Opening a Store in Hong Kong This Month

Apple is opening its first official store in Hong Kong this month, Bloomberg reports. The store will be in the International Finance Center Mall. Apple has said the store will open sometime this quarter; local news outlet Ming Pao Daily says more specifically that the 20,000-square-foot store will open on Sept. 24.

The shop will only be Apple’s fifth store in China. Out of the current four stores, two are in Beijing and two are in Shanghai. According to Ming Pao, which doesn’t cite any sources, Apple plans to open two more stores in Hong Kong in the future.

Apple has been rapidly expanding in China, although it was initially slow to move into the enormous Chinese market. It wasn’t until October 2010 that Apple opened its online store to Chinese customers. Lately, however, Apple’s push into Asia has paid off with dividends. In the second quarter of 2011, Apple’s sales in greater China (which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan) passed those of Lenovo for the first time.

In China, however, Apple has a lot of intellectual property headaches. Recently, Chinese authorities closed several fake Apple stores in the city of Kunming after a blog post exposed their existence to the media.

Google+ launch: search giant closes 10 products

By: Clint Boulton

2011-09-05

Google surprised many watchers in the high-tech world with its $12.5 billion acquisition bid for key Android phone maker Motorola Mobility on Aug. 15.

The $40-a-share, all-cash deal is a 63 percent premium. Google intends to run Motorola Mobility as a separate business should the deal close in 2011 or early 2012. Assuming the deal meets with the approval of federal regulators, the search engine would get a few things.

First is patent protection. Motorola has more than 17,000 patents, including those for 3G and 4G wireless technologies, as well as non-essential patents Google can use to defend itself in an increasingly litigious mobile market.

Second, like rival Apple, Google would own the hardware assets to build a closed, integrated system should it choose to do so. “They now have a mobile hardware business and they have tight integration into their software platform,” Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg told eWEEK.

Third, Google would gain Motorola’s set-top box business, which, in theory, it could use to fortify its less-than-stellar Google TV Web television service.

It’s easy to be swayed by the sexy allure of Google trying to beat Apple at its own proprietary game—or to imagine a world where the search engine was a major player in television services, using Motorola’s connections to make nice with broadcasters.

But this deal is fundamentally about patent protection. Google is being sued by Oracle for patent infringement over its use of the database software maker’s Java technology in Android.

In addition, Google’s Android OEMs (original equipment manufacturers)—including Motorola, Samsung and HTC—are being sued by Apple for using hardware and software in their Android phones that resemble technology used in the iPhone.

Microsoft and Motorola are also embroiled in a patent-infringement suit related to hardware and software used in their Android phones. This case is being overseen by the International Trade Commission.

So aggressive is the positioning against Google in the mobile sector that venerable foes Apple and Microsoft worked together to keep Nortel Networks’ 6,000-plus wireless, technology and other patents away from Google.

This led to Google publicly accusing Microsoft and Apple of setting up patent consortiums to seize control of valuable wireless patents. Twelve days later—boom!—Google dropped the Motorola bombshell. 

“Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies,” said Google CEO Larry Page in a corporate blog post.

Patent experts differ on just how much patent protection Motorola will afford Google and Android OEMs in the current lawsuits, but most agree they will at least serve as deterrents for future litigation.

Where Google’s 1,800 or so patents must appear to the opposition’s litigation teams as though the search engine was bringing knives to a gunfight, Motorola’s patents resemble so much heavy artillery.

Google may be buying patent protection, but it could also upset the delicate balance the company created by cultivating Android as open source. The company has maintained that Motorola will remain a licensee of Android, which will remain available to other OEMs under an open-source license.

Publicly, Samsung, HTC and others expressed support for the agreement, pointing to the obvious patent-protection angle. But most industry watchers aren’t buying the diplomatic responses, wondering whether these vendors fear Google will favor Motorola for new Android software builds.

These handset makers may not have to worry about Google-Motorola favoritism.

The Motorola merger is pending regulatory approval, which is far from assured considering the close antitrust scrutiny Google has come under by the Federal Trade Commission over its search and, allegedly, its Android software business.

No one saw this deal coming. As Gartner analyst Gartenberg said:  “A master magician always has you looking at their left hand while they try to get you to ignore what’s going on with their right.”

Google+ Gets Suggested User List

By: Clint Boulton

2011-09-04

Google+ has started offering suggested user lists, and already the complaints are rolling in after the model rankled users on Twitter two years ago.

Cribbing notes from Twitter's playbook, Google+ has begun offering a suggested user list and it's already causing quite a stir in social media circles.

Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management for Google+, tipped his hand to the effort in a tweet on Twitter Sept. 2, noting: "We're about to pilot a 'suggested user'-like mechanism on Google+. If you've got more than 100k followers on Twitter, DM me - let's talk!"

And here is the link to get started cherry-picking from the list:

Huffington Post Senior Editor Craig Kanalley found this list of famous folks. It includes Dallas Mavericks owner and Web pundit Mark Cuban, actor/businessman Ashton Kutcher, singer Britney Spears and the indomitable actor/pitchman William Shatner.

When Twitter launched its list two years ago, it made life easier for users who wanted new people to follow but didn't know how to find them. It also jacked up follower rates for popular people such as the celebrities listed above.

The result was that it made Twitter noisier, and left others wanting more followers at a disadvantage. Suggested user lists, after all, don't contribute to a level playing field.

Already the skepticism is rolling in on Google+. Kanalley noted:

"I don't think this is a good idea. It's going to alienate people and lead to an inevitable followers war that can hurt the health of the social network and inflate people's egos. As the famous get more followers, the non-featured fall farther behind, and a giant gap is created between the two. This is what happened on Twitter."

The Blog Report Executive Producer Zennie 62, who is black, complained the list is "overwhelmingly white.":

"The Google Suggested User List reads like the typical San Francisco Bay Area tech firm's view of the World: most of the "interesting and famous people" are white, and if they're black, they're male rappers or athletes. Hello, Snoop Dog, Chamillionaire, 50 Cent, Dwight Howard, and Floyd Mayweather!"

Zennir 62 further wondered whether Google didn't believe black women were noteworthy enough to put on its suggested user list.

Horowitz posted this list of suggestions for leveraging the suggested user list on Google+, noting that users need to be interesting if they want to get followed.

He didn't address Zennie 62's complaints of racist actions by Google, but did addressed Kanalley's concern of favoritism, which is shared by many in the social media sector:

"Today's list isn't yet personalized. At first personalization will be "lite" - users in different regions and languages will get different recommendations. But per above, we intend to allow people to deeply personalize and connect with like-minded people that create great content around almost any topic they care about.

He added that popular people must retain their position on the list by creating compelling content.
The bigger story is how Google+ is becoming more official leaning. In addition to suggested user list, there are verified accounts and serious consequences for users who don't use their real names on the social network.