By adaptive - June 8th, 2015
Google releases a slew of new offerings at its annual I/O developers conference, as PayPal sets its sights on the mobile payments space. Andrew Tolve reports.
In this week’s Digest: Google, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Android Pay, GrubHub, Groupon, AT&T, DIRECTV, T-Mobile, Dish Network, Android M, Apple, Google Photos, Google Cardboard, Facebook, Oculus Rift, Metaio, Apple Watch, Facebook Messenger, PayPal and eBay.
In the news
Google hosted its annual I/O Developer Conference in San Francisco, where it detailed its new mobile payment platform that will compete with Apple Pay and Samsung Pay. Google announced Android Pay back in March but had withheld details until now. The major credit cards of Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express are all on-board, as are apps like GrubHub and Groupon and third-party loyalty-card apps. Google says the platform will be fully operational in 700,000 stores when it goes live later this year with Google’s next mobile operating system, Android M. When it does, the mobile payment wars have officially begun.
In the money
Following AT&T’s $48.5 billion acquisition of satellite TV provider DIRECTV, T-Mobile and the Dish Network began talks of a merger that would see the second biggest TV provider and the fourth biggest wireless carrier in America join forces. Dish Network has been aggressively acquiring wireless spectrum in federal auctions over the past five years — it mopped up $13.3 billion of wireless spectrum in the latest federal auction this January — a move that would give T-Mobile lots of unused airwaves to offer more bandwidth to customers. Dish in turn could benefit from mobile media bundles and the elusive “quadruple play packages” that industry folk have been touting for years. Rumors of a T-Mobile price tag start at $60 billion.
In other news:
Returning to the Google I/O developer conference, Google unveiled its next-gen mobile operating system Android M, whose most-talked-about feature is Now on Tap, an upgraded personal assistant who can anticipate one’s needs based on location and time. As an example, if returning a car to a rental car company at the airport, Now on Tap will direct the driver to a gas station close to the airport without prompting. How well the system works, and whether it prompts an in-kind Siri upgrade from Apple, remains to be seen.
Google also announced Google Photos, an online photo trove where users can store unlimited quantities of photos for free and access them on any device anytime anywhere. There’s an asterisk: In order to get the infinite storage, Google has to be able to compress and resize your photos, meaning that the service will more likely end up being a photo sharing and short term stash than a long-term storage bin for all one’s photos.
And then there was Google Cardboard, Google’s low-cost solution to bring augmented reality to a mobile device near you. Google Cardboard has been around for most of 2015, but at Google I/O it released an app for iOS so that iPhone users can plug there smartphones into the makeshift cardboard goggles, which go for about $20, and check out what augmented reality is all about, without shelling out hundreds of bucks for Facebook’s Oculus Rift.
Apple acquired augmented reality company Metaio, which offers a range of AR tools. Our favorite is an app called Time Traveler that allows users to hold up a smartphone or tablet and see what a place used to look like in the past, like Berlin before the Berlin Wall came down. Per usual, Apple said nothing about what it plans to do with Metaio or how much it offered in the acquisition.
Sticking with Apple, Apple Watch will soon hit a store near you. The official brick-and-mortar date is June 26, at which point customers should be able to walk in and buy the watch without signing up for pre-orders and unspecified waits. Apple added that all those who have placed orders for Apple Watches to date will receive them before June is through.
Facebook beefed up its Messenger app yet again with a new caller ID feature. Profile pics, occupations, location, and other information drawn from a caller’s Facebook profile — these are what users can now expect to see whenever the phone rings (in the U.S., U.K., India and France for the time being).
Finally, returning to the mobile payments market with which we began, PayPal wants in. That’s the skinny from its new CEO, Dan Schulman, who will take over when the company splits from its parent company eBay later this year. A growing percentage of transactions on PayPal take place on mobile devices (it’s now north of 30%), and the internet’s original online payment king recognizes that if it’s going to maintain relevance moving forward, mobile devices are one of the primary places it has to serve. With the mobile payments market projected to reach $2.8 trillion by 2020, it’s no wonder. Schulman says PayPal will rebrand as a full service solution that manages everything from mobile transactions to loyalty rewards programs for its customers.
The Mobile Digest is a biweekly lowdown on the world of mobile, combining Open Mobile Media analysis with information from industry press releases.
Andrew Tolve is a regular contributor to Open Mobile Media.