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Flying under the radar amid a flurry of announcements from today’s Google I/O developer conference is the bigger news of how Google is stepping up its efforts to compete with online payment giants, such as PayPal. It plans to do so with a revamped checkout process for the web, mobile web, within mobile applications running on Android, and more.

It’s a proposed death to PayPal by a thousand cuts, leveraging everything from Chrome to Android and even Gmail. What Google hasn’t quite worked out yet is how all this will tie together in the long run, but you can see the plan beginning to form.

#1: Google Wallet On The Web: Storing Payment Credentials In Chrome

Let’s start with the browser, the de facto home for online shopping.

It’s not news that the checkout experience is broken. Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest pain points for today’s merchants, mainly because their websites have traditionally offered only cumbersome and tedious forms for shoppers to fill out in order to make a purchase.

As noted during today’s keynote, one of the hardest things you can do on the web is try to buy something. The process takes around 21 steps, the company explained. Of course, Google is exaggerating here a bit – billing and shipping details are usually the same, but Google counted each field (street, ZIP, etc.) twice.

That being said, things are even worse on mobile. Google notes that shopping cart abandonment on mobile devices is now an outrageous 97 percent. Again, that seems high (here’s the source for that figure), but the trend Google is illustrating with these slightly puffed up figures is not.

For comparison’s sake, Monetate’s data put global cart abandonment at around 82 percent as of Q4 2012. The company has been seeing increases in cart abandonment – which had been around 60 percent over the past several years – due to an increased number of shoppers doing research on mobile phones and other devices. As they reach the point of checking out on mobile, they’re now more likely to give up and move on because of the increased difficulty of the experience on mobile’s small screen, combined with retailers’ failure to roll out mobile-optimized experiences even as percentages of mobile shoppers continue to grow at record rates.

A number of startups have been attacking this challenge in various forms – mobile apps featuring universal carts, native m-commerce storefronts, mobile optimized payment flows, one-click mobile payments, in-stream payments, and more.

Google’s plan? Leverage Chrome.

Chrome is already the world’s most popular browser, with more than 750 million monthly active users today, up from 450 million just a year ago. Now it will begin baking a speedier checkout experience into its browser by syncing your billing information and other details within Chrome.

What that means is that when you visit a website using the Chrome browser, including the Chrome mobile browser, you’ll automatically be offered a prompt with your billing profiles. Chrome can then use autocomplete functionality to fill in information for you, such as your address, ZIP code, credit card info and more.

This functionality is being introduced via a new requestAutocomplete API, which Google describes here as “an aspiring web standard that will allow users to bypass pages of form fields with an imperative API for requesting details the browser knows.”

Google says this decreases the number of steps in the checkout process from 21 to just 3.

Overall, it’s a worthy attempt at solving the problem with online checkout, but it still suffers from some potential obstacles to broader adoption: Website owners will have to implement the functionality (the API) on their end, and unless this “aspiring” web standard becomes an “actual” web standard supported by all browsers, its impact would be limited.

This feature is still in its early days, but it’s designed to be open. Presumably, the company would still want to at least offer support for payment information retrieved from users’ Google Wallet accounts, if not actually require it. (Theoretically, payment info could just be saved directly in Chrome or any other browser without the need for a Wallet account.)

#2 Google Wallet On The Web (Um, Again): Google Wallet API

While the above describes what will first be a Chrome-only feature to start, Google Wallet has already found a way to support the web and mobile web through more traditional means.

In addition to supporting online checkout through Wallet, last fall, the company launched a Google Wallet API, which allows e-commerce website owners to support checkout via Google Wallet on mobile devices. This is independent of the browser or mobile operating system, however, making it more like an alternative to the PayPal button.

It’s a bit confusing because with the new Chrome autocomplete functionality, it seems there will be some overlap between the two. Site owners would end up implementing two APIs to be fully supportive of Google users: one to speed up checkout through automated form-filling in Chrome (likely pulling payment credentials from a user’s Google Wallet), and another if they wanted a Google Wallet button on their site that users could click to instead be walked through the Google Wallet checkout flow.

Which is better? How will these two tie together? For now, Google can’t say, only noting that it’s still “early days” for the Chrome autocomplete API and it’s probable that Google Wallet will be supported in some way.

But nothing is definite yet.

It’s indicative of how Google needs to bring its separate teams together in order to tell a more cohesive story about payments. Rumor has it that the Wallet team has been too “siloed,” which has caused some issues. (See part #5 below, for example).

#3 Going Wallet On Android: Paid Apps, In-App Purchases & Now, the Google Wallet Instant Buy Android API

Android is the world’s most popular mobile operating system, so it only makes sense for Google to take advantage of that fact to pull in more users’ payment information. After all, today’s users are already using Google Wallet to purchase paid applications for Android devices, as well as in-app purchases, so why not extend Wallet to support purchases of physical goods, too?

That’s just what Google did.

With the new Google Wallet Instant Buy Android API, merchants and developers selling physical goods and services (as opposed to virtual goods like those sold in mobile games), can now offer their customers 2-click checkout.

At launch, the company has signed on a number of new partners, including Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, Fancy, GoPago live POS, NFC Task Launcher, Priceline, Rue La La, Tabbedout, Uber and Wrapp.

The service ties in also with Google+, allowing users to register and sign in to the apps, similar to Facebook Connect, and then tap to checkout without the need to enter billing or shipping information.

#4: Google Wallet in Gmail: “Attach” Money

Another vector in the fight to topple PayPal is person-to-person payments – like paying the babysitter or paying your dad the money you borrowed, for example. Digitally savvy folks today still largely turn to PayPal to make this happen.

Google’s plan here? Leverage Gmail.

It’s simple and ingenious really. The familiar email “attachment” icon has just become another onboarding experience for Google Wallet. With the Gmail update, the service’s 425 million+ users can hover over the attachment paperclip icon, then click the $ icon in order to “attach money” to their message.

Of course you’ll need a Google Wallet account first.

For now, the feature is only available in the desktop version of Gmail, but it will certainly come to mobile in time.

#5 Google Wallet In Real World? (What’s Plan B If NFC Never Wins?)

The only area where Google is lacking a solid strategy is in real-world payments – an area where competitor PayPal has been ramping up quickly in recent months. PayPal has been working with nearly two-dozen nationwide retail chains, including Home Depot, Jamba Juice and more, to be integrated into their point-of-sale systems. It has separately announced integrations with point-of-sale and hardware makers like NCR, gas station and convenience store-focused Gilbarco Veeder-Root’s point-of-sale system, coin-counting kiosk maker Coinstar, and more.

Google has been trudging along with its NFC-based Google Wallet app. The app uses technology whose broader adoption has been slow to pick up here in the U.S., in part due to a lack of support from Apple, as well as swirling questions as to how much of an improvement tapping your phone at point-of-sale really has over a card swipe in the long run.

Google had plans to launch a plastic “universal” credit card that would allow users to switch between their preferred payment methods on the fly while still using a physical card at point-of-sale. For whatever reason, the company scrapped those plans just ahead of Google I/O.

Combined, all of the above areas on their own can’t be considered a PayPal killer by any means. But as they become more tightly integrated over time (assuming Google can get its teams together to focus on the bigger picture beyond their own product’s development and focus on the global stage), you can see a viable threat to PayPal starting to shape up.

Google announced today that Google TV is being updated to the latest version of Android and Chrome. This is, of course, one of a slew of announcements out of the Mountain View company today, with Google I/O currently in full swing.

Over the last three years since Google TV came out, its ecoystem has grown to 10 device manufacturers, 5 chipset makers and 5 TV operators across 10 countries. It uses thousands of apps through Google Play and Chrome.

Here’s what the Google TV team had to say about the news on Google+:

Google TV Developers46 minutes ago

Over the past few months Google TV has gathered momentum by launching powerful features for our users such as the highest quality voice search of any TV product and strong manufacturer adoption of the platform. At Google I/O, it’s time to talk about developers and enabling them to bring more great experiences to TV.

Today, Google TV is moving to the latest version of Android (Jelly Bean, 4.2.2), and we’ve refactored Google TV so that our TV OEM partners can update to future versions of Android in a matter of weeks rather than months. For developers, this means you can build TV experiences using the latest Android APIs, including the NDK. 

Today Google TV is also moving to the latest version of Chrome, and from now on Google TV benefits from Chrome updates on the same six week cycle that you’ve come to expect from Chrome. In Chrome on Google TV, we’ve added support for hardware-based content protection, enabling developers to provide premium TV content in HD within their web apps. 

Google TV-powered devices in market will start to receive updates in the coming months, and we expect to see new devices launched later this year.  If you are attending Google IO, please check out the “Android: As seen on TV!” session and stop by the Google TV Developer Sandbox area.
https://developers.google.com/tv/

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Google I/O 2013: Android: As seen on TV!
Google TV gives developers a consistent Android platform to create and deliver applications, games and high quality media on the largest screen in the house. In this session we’ll show you how to unlock the potential of the current Google TV devices and explain the new features of the next generation Google TV platform. 37    29 Powered by socialditto

This morning, we kicked off the 6th annual Google I/O developer conference with over 6,000 developers at Moscone Center in San Francisco, 460 I/O Extended sites in 90 countries, and millions of you around the world who tuned in via our livestream. Over the next three days, we’ll be hosting technical sessions, hands-on code labs, and demonstrations of Google’s products and partners’ technology.

We believe computing is going through one of the most exciting moments in its history: people are increasingly adopting phones, tablets and newer type of devices. And this spread of technology has the potential to make a positive impact in the lives of people around the world—whether it’s simply helping you in your daily commute, or connecting you to information that was previously inaccessible.

This is why we focus so much on our two open platforms: Android and Chrome. They enable developers to innovate and reach as many people as possible with their apps and services across multiple devices. Android started as a simple idea to advance open standards on mobile; today it is the world’s leading mobile platform and growing rapidly. Similarly, Chrome launched less than five years ago from an open source project; today it’s the world’s most popular browser.

In line with that vision, we made several announcements today designed to give developers even more tools to build great apps on Android and Chrome. We also shared new innovations from across Google meant to help make life just a little easier for you, including improvements in search, communications, photos, and maps.

Here’s a quick look at some of the announcements we made at I/O:

• Android & Google Play: In addition to new developer tools, we unveiled Google Play Music All Access, a monthly music subscription service with access to millions of songs that joins our music store and locker; and the Google Play game services with real-time multiplayer and leaderboards. Also, coming next month to Google Play is a special Samsung Galaxy S4, which brings together cutting edge hardware from Samsung with Google’s latest software and services—including the user experience that ships with our popular Nexus devices.
• Chrome: With over 750 million active users on Chrome, we’re now focused on bringing to mobile the speed, simplicity and security improvements that we’ve seen on the desktop. To that end, today we previewed next-generation video codec VP9 for faster video-streaming performance; the requestAutocomplete API for faster payments; and Chrome Experiments such as “A Journey Through Middle Earth” and Racer to demonstrate the ability to create immersive mobile experiences not possible in years past.
• Google+: We unveiled the newly designed Google+, which helps you easily explore content as well dramatically improve your online photo experience to give you crisp, beautiful photos—without the work! We also upgraded Google+ Hangouts—our popular group video application—to help bring all of your real-life conversations online, across any device or platform, and with groups of up to 10 friends.
• Search: Search has evolved considerably in recent years: it can now have a real conversation with you, and even make your day a bit smoother by predicting information you might need. Today we added the ability to set reminders by voice and we previewed “spoken answers” on laptops and desktops in Chrome—meaning you can ask Google a question and it will speak the answer back to you.
• Maps: Today we previewed the next generation of Google Maps, which gets rid of any clutter in order to put your individual experience and exploration front and center. Each time you click or search, our technology draws you a tailored map that highlights the information you need. From design to directions, the new Google Maps is smarter and more useful.

Technology can have a profound, positive impact on the daily lives of billions of people. But we can’t do this alone—developers play a crucial role. I/O is our chance to come together and thank you for everything you do.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Android, Chrome & Apps

Cydia, a platform commonly thought of as the alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones and iPads, has just today arrived on Android of all places, in the form of Cydia Substrate*, a tool for developers to build code modifications to other applications. Though Android is by its nature more open and customizable than Apple’s locked-down iOS, it now has a growing collection of apps designed for power users who root their devices – a process that’s similar in spirit to the iOS jailbreak.

Jailbreaking an iPhone makes a lot of sense because customizing Apple’s software, including its lockscreen and homescreen, is all but impossible. However, on Android, the perception is that many of the quirks and customizations you may desire can be managed through the installation of third-party apps, ranging from Android launchers that can change everything about the device (like Facebook’s Home application, for instance) to very specific tweaks that can change the device’s default behavior.

That being said, rooting an Android phone gives users even more power to do things outside of the scope of what’s possible out of the box. In addition to being able to upgrade to newer versions of Android ahead of “official” releases, various apps for rooted phones and tablets allow users to adjust CPU settings, define custom multitouch gestures, record video of their screens, undelete files, gain access to apps not offered in their country, adjust cache size, change permissions, and a host of other delightfully geeky things.

Cydia could one day become a centralized place to find all those things, but at launch it is merely the framework. The only Cydia-enabled extension available at this time is WinterBoard, the “theme engine” that grew popular on iOS over the years as a way to customize more than just the phone’s background. On Android, WinterBoard works with themes provided by other customization platforms, including ADW Launcher, GO Launcher Ex, Launcher Pro, dxTop, and the T-Mobile/CyanogenMod Theme Chooser platform.

According to a lengthy and detailed description on the Cydia Substrate app in Google Play, the software will run on Android versions 2.3 and up, plus “equivalent” versions like CyanogenMod or the Kindle Fire. It will also work on ARM or Intel CPUs and even on Google Glass. (Are people rooting Glass? Do tell.)

The Cydia Substrate has been tested on a number of Android devices, but as with rooting itself, it’s not the sort of thing for a layperson to undertake without a backup in place…and a backup plan, too, on the off chance things go awry and you end up bricking your phone.

If, however, you feel comfortable going beyond the bounds of what’s officially approved, to get started with Cydia (after first gaining root), you can install the APK from the new Cydia homepage or Google Play, then grant Superuser access to Substrate when prompted.

Videos showing Cydia in action on Android have already started popping up on YouTube if you’re more curious than motivated for now:

Cydia Substrate for Android is new, but its iOS counterpart is now being used by tens of millions of users, according to Cydia creator Jay Freeman.

*Updated, 8 PM ET, to clarify that Cydia, the app store itself, has not come to Android, only Cydia Substrate, in case the headline was unclear. The ”Cydia Installer,” an app on iOS, and the “Cydia Store” payment model it uses, are parts of an alternative app store for jailbroken Apple devices, Freeman clarifies via email. “Cydia Substrate” is part of the whole ecosystem, but is not an app store. It is a tool for developers to build code modifications to other applications. Freeman says a Cydia store is not off the table. There is, however, a Cydia Gallery inside of the Substrate settings application, but this links to the Google Play Store. 

AT&T is prepared to discontinue the Android HTC First due to stagnant sales, according to The Guardian.

After introducing the so-called Facebook phone at the beginning of April, AT&T has sold fewer than 15,000 units and dropped its price from 99 dollars to 99 cents. By comparison, AT&T has sold an average of 300,000 Android phones per month since the beginning of 2013. AT&T denied plans to cancel the HTC First and described the price plummet as a "promotion."

Meanwhile, Facebook Home, the software package that makes Facebook the raison d'être of Android phones, is struggling with poor reviews and slow sales. It has taken a month for Home to limp past the 1 million download mark on Google Play, where it has an average rating of 2.2 out of 5. "This launcher is great if you want your lockscreen to show your Facebook feed but awful if you still need to use your phone for any other reason," a user wrote in one of over 8,000 one-star reviews.

News outlets like Salon and Business Insider have been quick to declare Facebook Home a dud. Not so, said Wired, pointing out that it often takes multiple iterations for apps to eliminate problems and catch on to an audience. 

Open Garden, the San Francisco-based startup that allows Android, Windows and Mac users to create mesh networks between their devices to share Internet connections, today announced that it has managed to get Google Glass to connect to its network. This matters because Glass users typically need a tethering plan to connect to the Internet (which is pretty much essential to using Glass). Those plans typically cost around $20 extra, depending on the data plan and carrier. With Open Garden, users can just use the service to connect to their phones without paying extra.

Open Garden, as the company’s co-founder and CEO Micha Benoliel told me, also makes it far easier for Glass users to connect to the Internet. Right now, you have to set up Wi-Fi access through Google’s configuration page and scan a QR code with Glass for Wi-Fi access. You also, of course, have to pair Glass with your smartphone via Bluetooth if you want to use it away from your home. With Open Garden running on Glass, Benoliel argues, all of this would be seamless because the device would just automatically connect to the Internet.

“We believe the Android OS is going to reach out to more and more new types of wearable devices,” says Open Garden’s CEO and co-founder Micha Benoliel. “Google Glass is one of them. It shows how Open Garden can enhance the user experience and become the by default solution to keep your devices always connected to the Internet.”

The company’s CTO and co-founder Stanislav Shalunov makes a similar argument: “We put Open Garden on Glass and formed a mesh network with it and we want every Glass user to be able to just use the Internet without having to install, pair, or configure anything, but for that we need Google to help us make this a reality.” Given the realities of the market, however, it remains to be seen if Google will ever allow this.

Open Garden says its software has been installed by more than 2.5 million users since its launch at TechCrunch Disrupt NY last year. The company has also partnered with a number of app developers, including Kicksend, TextMe and others, to expand its reach.

Wired publishes an interview with Sundar Pichai, Google’s Senior Vice President for Chrome, Apps and now Android. Back in March, Larry Page announced that “Andy [Rubin] decided it’s time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google”. Now Sundar Pichai is in charge of Android and many people wondered if Android and Chrome OS will merge.

“Android and Chrome are both large, open platforms, growing very fast. I think that they will play a strong role, not merely exist. I see this as part of friendly innovation and choice for both users and developers. (…) So in the short run, nothing changes. In the long run, computing itself will dictate the changes. We’re living through a pivotal moment. It’s a world of multiple screens, smart displays, with tons of low-cost computing, with big sensors built into devices. At Google we ask how to bring together something seamless and beautiful and intuitive across all these screens. The picture may look different a year or two from from now, but in the short term, we have Android and we have Chrome, and we are not changing course,” Sundar says.

He compares Android and Chrome OS with iOS and Mac OSX, which are different, but have a lot of things in common. “We want to do the right things at each stage, for users and developers. We are trying to find commonalities. On the browser layer, we share a lot of stuff. We will increasingly do more things like that. And maybe there’s a more synergistic answer down the line.”

That explains features like Cloud Messaging for Chrome, launched one year after Cloud Messaging for Android. Chrome also experimented with intents, but this feature is no longer supported.

It’s interesting to note that Sundar’s biggest Android challenge is to “improve the whole world’s end-user experience without changing the open nature of Android”. That’s difficult to do, considering that most Android devices run old Android versions and some are rarely updated, not to mention that the most popular Android devices run custom operating systems based on Android, with custom interfaces, frameworks and different built-in apps.

For now, both Android and Chrome OS will continue to exist. Chrome’s new packaged apps will also be available on mobile devices and it will be interesting to see if they look like native apps. Android tries to fight fragmentation by introducing new APIs using Google Play Services. For now, native apps make more sense on a mobile device than on a desktop computer, but this could change. Chrome OS could follow Firefox OS and run on smartphones and tablets.

Whether your laptop runs Windows, Android or Chrome OS, whether your phone or tablet runs Android, iOS, Chrome OS or Firefox OS, Google’s goal is to “bring together something seamless and beautiful and intuitive across all these screens”. I call it Google Operating System and it’s not Android or Chrome OS.

Adding more fuel to the “Amazon is building a smartphone” rumors, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported today that the company is developing two smartphones and an audio-only music device. Though, the report doesn’t say these devices will likely carry the Kindle brand. The WSJ…



Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Software quality assurance testing on Android devices is far easier than it was just a year ago, at least according to one of Asia’s largest mobile app developers, Animoca.

The Hong Kong company has produced over 300 apps since it started two years ago, and just shot past 150 million downloads collectively. It produces mainly Android apps.

Last year, Animoca’s testing process for its apps covered a whopping 400 Android devices. Today, this number has been slashed to just a quarter of that, largely because of standardization in the Android handset industry.

According to Yat Siu, CEO of Animoca’s parent company Outblaze, most phones have become standardized on Samsung’s base hardware, thanks to the Korean manufacturer’s cornering of the component market.

Besides making its own branded devices, Samsung provides parts for a huge array of other devices. In 2012, Samsung was the world’s biggest manufacturer of NAND Flash (31 percent), DRAM (38 percent), and display components (25 percent).

The evolution of Android’s platform over the years has also made it a lot more flexible for app developers on the software side of things, with fewer variants of Jelly Bean than Gingerbread, he added. Together with hardware standardization, this has really eased the amount of testing that Animoca has to do today.

“Japan is the outlier in all of this—they have the strangest phones, and each one is a little different from the other. The rest of the world is mainly quite similar, based on Samsung hardware,” said Yat.

Phones are also getting better. He said that the 400 testing devices from 2012 were mainly made up of low-end handsets. “You have to cater to low-end devices because otherwise, you cancel out your biggest audience. But all the new hardware is pretty kickass, and more and more devices are getting very capable,” he said.

Animoca employs about 100 people working just on its apps, and has operations in Korea, the Philippines, the US and China. Its strategy is to flood the market with apps hitting different niche markets, rather than try to create a “Supercell-style or Angry Birds blockbuster” hit, said Yat.

Some of its titles, Star Girl and Pretty Pet Salon have pretty much reached hit status, but the company is focused on churning out a higher volume of app varieties, in the hopes of casting a wider net for loyal fans. “Those become paying audiences,” he said.

While Star Girl is enjoying millions of downloads, it’s still a niche app. “It targets girls, you share clothes and virtually flirt with guys. It’s not a Candy Crush,” said Yat.

The company has grown about four times in the past 12 months, although he wouldn’t say how much revenue it brings in now. “Frankly, we grew because Android grew as well,” he said, referring to Android’s growing market share. “That’s why Korea and Japan are big markets for us, because they are strong Android bases,” he said.

Animoca produces iOS versions of some of its games, but remains focused on Android, where ARPU is “very comparable” to iOS. Users in Japan and Korea tend to spend most on apps, said Yat.

It’s usually a bad thing when rappers get a game based on their musical persona. 50 Cent Bulletproof is widely regarded as one of the worst games ever made, and its sequel is known as one of the most unintentionally funny games ever made. Now Snoop Dogg Lion is trying his hand at the whole video game thing.

In Way of the Dogg, our protagonist, America Jones, finds himself with a dead girlfriend or something. Vowing revenge, he seeks training from Snoop Dogg at his mystical temple. What follows is a rhythm combat game where players hit buttons in time with Snoop’s classic beats.

While Way of the Dogg is a rhythm fighter, some are going to make the comparison to Shaq Fu. The good news is that Snoop’s new game can’t be anywhere near as bad as Shaq Fu. The bad news is that it will probably still be a lousy game, as most licensed games are.

Way of the Dogg is coming to the PS3, Xbox 360, Android and iOS sometime in the near future.