Shareworthy articles and content syndicated from other sites. These aren’t things I’ve written or necessarily endorse, for the record.
![Click here to read A Computer Error Released 450 Prisoners with "a High Risk of Violence"](https://i0.wp.com/fastcache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2011/05/small_californias-crowded-prisons_01.jpg?resize=190%2C120 "Click here to read A Computer Error Released 450 Prisoners with "a High Risk of Violence"")
Computer system errors accidentally released more than 450 inmates with “a high risk of violence” from California prisons. What might be even worse is that no attempt has been made to return any of them back to prison.More »
Google’s long-rumored near field communications mobile payment system is officially on its way, the company announced today at a press conference in New York City.
Google announced both Google Wallet and Offers today, which give users the ability to process payments through smartphone via NFC. Google Wallet will first be available for Nexus S Android phones via Sprint this summer and expand to other NFC-capable phones over time. The initial rollout will be in New York City and San Francisco. Wallet will first support a Citi MasterCard wherever MasterCard PayPass is accepted as well as a prepaid Google card. Now that NFC mobile payment is finally a reality, will it be a game changer in how people pay?
Sponsor
Google’s announcement is reverberating around the industry. Mobile payments startup Square, which uses a dongle to swipe credit cards and not NFC, has certainly been put on notice, especially since competitor Verifone is a partner in the NFC technology. Square announced a payment processing register and card case that will compete with Google Wallet for space on retailers’ shelves earlier this week.
The original online payments leader, PayPal, expressed skepticism that Google can be a leader in payments.
“As the mobile payment leader (we expect $2 billion in payment volume to transact over mobile devices via PayPal in 2011), we’d be happy to comment,” said PayPal spokesperson Anuj Nayar. “Put simply – before you try mobile (or any other payments) solution, you need to be great at payments. There is so much more than just technology involved to get payments right … Any new solution must deliver something better than the existing way to do it. Not just different … better.”
Google rolled out the partners for the announcement today and there are some heavy hitters on the list: Citi is the bank behind the service, First Data is a point-of-sale company that handles 40 billion transactions a year, Verifone and Sprint will be the original handset provider through the Nexus S. Between Citi and First Data, there is enough payment knowledge that PayPal is now on notice as well.
Groupon has yet another competitor as Google will deliver Offers to email inboxes and there will be deals through check-ins, online advertisements and Google Places. Groupon has partnered with Loopt and possibly with Foursquare in the past week, but the difference between Google Wallet and Groupon is that Wallet will be an app on any Android NFC phone, which according to Google, should be 150 million devices worldwide by 2014.
“This is not just an announcement, this is a real project,” said Google’s Osama Badier, a former top executive at PayPal.
One of the issues surrounding mobile and online payments has been security. Google said that it has taken industry best practices and added an additional layer on top. Payment information will be encrypted on the phone and the transaction will be secure between the merchant POS system and the security chip that manages the wallet on the smartphone. The wallet cannot be used unless it is unlocked with a PIN and NFC will be disabled if the phone’s screen is off.
“We took the industry standard best practices with PayPass and smart card-based payments and wanted to make sure we added extra on top of that to really protect consumers and their credit card information,” said Robert von Behren, one of the co-founders of the Google Wallet project. “This chip has a lot of security baked into it and this is where we are storing the credit card information.”
While Google Wallet and Offers are cool, it may take a while for the technology to become mainstream. Smartphones sales are increasing exponentially and within the next several years most people will own some type of smart device with NFC enabled. But, if you thinking about paying for your Christmas presents with your phone this winter, you probably will not be able to. Holiday season 2012 is more likely.
“This will accelerate the growth of NFC technology and handset adoption, however, it is still at least 1-2 years away from mass adoption and significant market penetration,” said Dan Trigub, VP of business development at mobile advertising specialist Blue Bite. “That said, this will help advance the adoption and awareness of the technology as we are very excited about it. Likewise, given the growth of the mTAG and our NFC content delivery platform, this is something that we would ultimately want to integrate and offer through our network as well.”
The news about Google Wallet broke last night after an internal memo from The Container Store was leaked on ThisIsMyNext.com and NFC company ViVoTech let slip the news as well to TechCrunch.
It was almost exactly a year ago that Diaspora started raising money on Kickstarter. A few weeks later, they had raised $200,000 from nearly 6,500 backers. Why so much excitement? Because Diaspora was aiming to be a Facebook alternative. That hasn’t exactly worked out. At least not yet. But now another startup is about to give it a go, Altly.
So why will this one be any different than Diasopra? Well, for one thing, it’s being started by a pretty well-known entrepreneur. Dmitry Shapiro, the founder of Veoh, is also the one behind Altly. While Veoh didn’t end so well (a firesale acquisition after raising nearly $70 million), they were once a very hot property in the online video space.
But even more notably, Shapiro was most recently an executive at Facebook rival MySpace (he worked on MySpace Music).
So why is Shapiro now aiming head-first at Facebook? He outlines the decision in a lengthy post on Altly’s blog. The basic gist? Facebook’s privacy controls are too confusing. And their social graph is now a mess. Oh, and they’re way too big and powerful. Their “tentacles” are everywhere on the web, and this is a problem because our privacy is at risk. Our data is locked in. Etc.
In other words, the usual critiques of Facebook.
But my favorite reason is this:
At this time there are no real alternatives to Facebook, as most people believe that no one can possibly create an alternative.
Mind. Blown. Well, except for the aforementioned Diaspora. And MySpace, which was once king, and tried to compete with Facebook, but simply lost. And others.
But Shapiro does have a point. As he writes:
There are NO serious alternatives at this time. For every Coke there is a Pepsi, for every Ford there is a Chevy, for every PC there is a Mac and for every Facebook there is…. a void! Facebook has such overwhelming power that practically no one believes that trying to build an alternative is possible.
But the problem is that this is not because of anything nefarious Facebook is doing. It’s simply because the rivals that have popped up haven’t been very good. And Facebook, for all its faults, is a very good, and very well-run product.
So Altly will take on this monumental task. And they’ll apparently do so with backing from DFJ.
They seem to be saying the right things. But so did Diaspora. It’s all about the execution. We’ll be watching this one closely, obviously.
Last fall, we noted that the Senate Judiciary Committee had unanimously voted to approve COICA, a bill for censoring the internet as a favor to the entertainment industry. Thankfully, Senator Ron Wyden stepped up and blocked COICA from progressing. This year, COICA has been replaced by the PROTECT IP Act, which fixes some of the problems of COICA, but introduces significant other problems as well. A wide cross section of people who actually understand technology and innovation have come out against PROTECT IP as written — including librarians, human rights groups, public interest groups (pdf) and various technology groups (pdf), including CEA, CCIA and NetCoalition. Most significantly, a group of internet/DNS specialists have made a strong case that this would break the internet in significant ways:
So, with the people who actually understand this stuff pointing out that PROTECT IP would break the internet and go against various stated important priorities for the internet, you would think that the Senate Judiciary Committee might hold off before moving forward with such a poorly thought out bill.
But, you know, the Hollywood lobbyists want it. So, let’s just ignore the people who actually understand this stuff and give Hollywood what they want.
This morning the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously voted to move forward with PROTECT IP as is. It seems only fair to once again name the Senators who just voted (with a voice vote) to break the internet. Here’s your list of technologically ignorant lawmakers of the day:
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story