Recently, Google announced its new tap-to-pay service, Google Wallet. With Google Wallet, consumers will be able to store credit card information on their mobile phones and tap the phone at participating businesses to make a payment. Google Wallet will be available for consumers with a Citi MasterCard or Google Prepaid Card and Sprint's Nexus S 4G by Google cell phone when it launches.
PayPal's lawsuit stems from Google's hiring of Osama Bedier as its vice president of payments. Bedier worked for PayPal for nine years and, in the suit, PayPal alleges that Bedier put trade secrets about PayPal's mobile payment strategy on his computer just prior to leaving PayPal for Google. Stephenie Tilenius, a former PayPal executive, is also named in the suit. She started at Google in 2009 and allegedly recruited Bedier to Google. Both Bedier and Tilenius have both been involved in the development of Google Wallet.
Aside from the lawsuit, Google Wallet faces challenges such as stiff competition from cellphone providers and Visa and more importantly, getting consumers to adopt this new technology.
Google Offers Launches
Google Offers, Google's response to its failed acquisition of Groupon, debuted its first offer in Portland, Oregon in early June. Google Offers will begin serving New York City, Oakland, and San Francisco in the near future. The new service joins an already crowded field of competitors that aim to get consumers to purchase a voucher (Groupon, Living Social, Google Offers) or just request a free voucher (Scoutmob) for the offer of the day. Google will take things a step further and will try to differentiate itself by integrating Google Offers with its forthcoming Google Wallet service so consumers only have to tap their phone to redeem and pay for an offer at the same time.
While Google certainly has the advertising reach, platform, and financial ability to support Google Offers, the demand from both businesses – who pay significant fees to have their deals advertised – and consumers – who can already subscribe to a number of offers in their area (Atlanta has 10+/day) – is questionable.
Bing Upgrades Webmaster Tools
In early June, Bing released its \"Honey Badger\" update to Bing Webmaster Tools. The new version's features include a crawl delay that lets webmasters determine how fast Bing crawls their websites by the hour, a reworked Index Explorer that shows webmasters how Bing has indexed their sites, user and role management (read only, admin, etc.), and new self-help guides and documents. Learn more details about the Honey Badger update.
Bing Touts \"Friend Effect\" with Deeper Facebook Integration
Recently, Bing improved its integration with Facebook and additional customization of search results that are displayed when its users are signed in to Facebook. This new level of integration is a significant leap forward from the confusing and difficult-to-activate integration that Bing and Facebook announced last October. Now, users simply sign in to Facebook, and Bing will customize search results based on data about the user and his/her friends.
Bing's research indicated that 90% of people in a survey sought the advice of family and friends before making decisions – what Bing dubs the \"friend effect.\" With Facebook, Bing brings the advice of family and friends into the search results to help users make decisions faster. For example, searching for a Facebook friend's name in Bing will put it at the top of the search results. In addition, when you search for a location, Bing will tell you if any of your Facebook friends have lived there or \"liked\" that location. Bing also lets you know when your Facebook friends like certain music, movies, books, articles, etc. Nifty stuff, but a little creepy too.
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