Do You Want Your Cell Phone to Act as a Credit Card?

The idea, instigated by VeriFone Systems Inc., is to turn your cell phone into an electronic credit card wallet.

"A phone is a lot smarter than a card," said Doug Bergeron, VeriFone's chief executive, in an interview. "It opens the door to a rich experience at the point of sale that retailers really covet."

I'm not paranoid, but isn't this Google-backed system a little Big-Brother-creepy? (I refer to the George Orwell book and not the reality TV show.)

Here some app for for thought:

1) The VeriFone device will turn you into a walking litmus test for spending behavior. Unlike some other forms of advertising, the system would allow Google to generate ads targeted by
locales and past purchases.

2) Remember what happened with hummus purchases at Safeway? After 9/11, the government concocted a plan to chart excessive hummus purchases at Safeway -- being all terrorists love hummus.

3) Having your credit card activated by an app detaches you from spending in the same way FarmVille detaches you from reality.

4) It's easier to steal a cell phone than a credit card -- imagine the new breed of credit card criminal hierarchy that will be created; with foot soldiers doing the street level theft and hackers extracting the credit card information.

What's your opinion on cell phone credit card apps? Should we all hold out for the safe-and-secure retina scans -- promised to us in such sci-fi movies as Blade Runner?

4.Google To Let AdWords Advertisers Target Contextually By Category

Google has announced additional targeting capabilities for ads appearing on its Display Network, allowing advertisers to choose categories, rather than keywords, to trigger their ad’s appearance.

Given AdWords’ genesis as a search-oriented advertising system, keywords have always been the main mechanism for targeting ads, though additional refinements and options have long been available. Now, Google seems to be acknowledging that there are other good ways of contextually, especially for advertisers looking for awareness, rather than for immediate sales.

The new targeting capabilities will give advertisers the ability to select 1,750 topics and sub-topics that are mapped to the pages upon which Display Network ads appear. Google says its system looks at all the words on a page to determine the topic of the page, rather than being reliant on particular keywords. Advertisers can also exclude topics or sub-topics to refine targeting.

Review: Google Nexus S

With so many Google Android smartphones flooding the market at the moment, it's becoming increasingly difficult to pick between the various models.

For many, the difference between the brands is often marginal, save for models such as Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play (the “PlayStation Phone”), which specifically targets the hardcore gamer niche.
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The Nexus S doesn't target any niche in particular but is highly suited to tech-savvy users who want super-fast web browsing, a solid camera and a clean user-interface uncluttered by telco or vendor apps.

It is the second Google-branded phone, following on from the Nexus One that was launched in January last year to show off Google's Android platform but never made it in significant quantities to Australia.

Manufactured by Samsung, the Nexus S is similar to the highly regarded Galaxy S but, instead of a custom Samsung user interface (UI) overlay, offers a pure Android experience. I much prefer this but it comes down to personal preference.

It is the first Android phone to hit Australia that runs Android version 2.3 (Gingerbread), which offers an updated UI, significantly improved on-screen keyboard and better power and application management than the previous version (Froyo).

The Nexus S is also the first phone on the market to include a near-field communication (NFC) chip, meaning it will support upcoming applications that allow people to, for instance, swipe their phone in order to pay for goods in a shop.

It's a pretty useless feature for now as NFC is very much in the trial phase in Australia at the moment. Earlier this month, Visa launched a trial of NFC technology in partnership with 20,000 retail stores; participants can pay by swiping an iPhone hooked up to an accessory that adds NFC support.

With the Nexus S all of the NFC smarts are built into the phone itself but I ended up turning the feature off as it kept picking up the electronic tags on my work security pass and cards in my wallet.

The Nexus S has a gorgeous 4-inch Super AMOLED display that is great for viewing video and web pages but while it supports common file formats like MP3 audio and MP4 video, it won't play DivX or XviD files out-of-the-box, which is a disappointment.

That said, although many basic users won't be aware of this, I'm told the Rockplayer app – found on the Android Market - adds playback support for a range of media files including DivX, XviD and AVI.

Files can be stored on the 16GB of built-in space but there's no microSD slot for further expansion. This was annoying as it was more difficult to port over the content from my previous phone.

There is also no HDMI connectivity for connecting the phone up to a TV display.

As you'd expect from a Google-branded phone, the Nexus S offers the speediest web browsing experience I've seen on a smartphone. The browser supports Adobe Flash, but it is both a blessing and a curse as pages that are loaded with Flash ads are often choppy to navigate.

There are five available home screens for users to customise with their widgets and apps. The phone doesn't come pre-loaded with reams of widgets and wallpapers like some other HTC and Samsung Android phones I've used but all of these are easily accessible in the Android market.

The phone is light at 129g grams (the iPhone 4 is 137 grams) and fits really nicely in the hand. I'm a fan of the clean, rounded design and the look of the phone but the plastic bezel doesn't offer the premium metallic feel of other devices like the iPhone 4 and HTC Desire HD.

One of my biggest gripes with earlier Android phones is that they offer poor cameras, especially compared with the stellar camera on the iPhone 4.

But this is a non-issue with the Nexus S, which offers a front-facing camera for video chat and a 5-megapixel rear camera that produces almost as good still shots as the iPhone 4. Video recording is passable but not HD like on other devices.

The battery will easily get you through the day on a single charge and part of the way into the following day, depending on how heavy a user you are. I'm more than satisfied with this after being disappointed with the HTC Desire HD, which often struggled to make it through half a day with auto-sync turned on.

There's much to love about the raw speed and clean design of the Nexus S and, save for a few missing features like a microSD slot, it is one of the better Android phones on the market today for power users.

Amazon Beats Rivals Into the 'Cloud'

Technology titans are racing to deliver music and other digital files from online storehouses, with Amazon.com Inc. grabbing the inside track over rivals such as Apple Inc. and Google Inc.

The competition comes amid a shift in the way digital songs, videos and other media are being purchased and played. For years, the marketplace has been dominated by Apple's iTunes store and a business model based around downloaded files.

But the proliferation of mobile gadgets—and fears of losing access to family photos, music or other valuable files on broken or lost devices—is expected to drive consumer interest in remote storage lockers for digital files that can be accessed anywhere.

Amazon has already developed a significant sideline that rents computing resources and data-storage capacity to companies over the Internet—or in the cloud, in industry jargon.

Amazon is starting an online service that lets people store digital music. But this cloud service is in a gray area until Amazon negotiates licenses with music publishers. Plus: can it compete with iTunes? Peter Kafka discusses with Ethan Smith and Stu Woo.

With its launch Tuesday of a service called Amazon Cloud Drive, the company is angling to build a comparable beachhead in the battle over consumers. Both Google and Apple have been developing similar Web-based offerings.

Amazon's service lets people store up to five gigabytes of music, photos, videos and documents on server systems operated by the company. The basic storage is free; additional space can be purchased for a yearly fee.

The approach is designed to let consumers play music they have purchased or access other data files from multiple computers—such as at the home or office—as well as smartphones and tablets running Google's Android software. Amazon's service doesn't work with Apple's iPhone.

"Five years from now, people will think of online services like Cloud Drive as the primary place for safe keeping of critical information, as opposed to a backup, which is how they think about it today," said Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research. "It is a big deal for Amazon to get into this."

While Amazon has built a sizeable business in selling MP3 music downloads, its sales remain far behind those of Apple—whose hit iPods, iPhones and iPads can sync files directly with iTunes, unlike competing hardware.

Apple's MobileMe service already lets users store and sync their email, calendar and contacts in a central location for $99 a year.
Other Clouds

    * Flickr: Yahoo's service for uploading and sharing photos. Cost: Free with upload limits
    * Mozy: EMC service to store music, photos and emails. Cost: Starts at $5.99 a month
    * Dropbox: Store and sync files. Cost: 2GB of free storage; $9.99 a month for 50GB
    * Google Docs: Create, upload and share documents, spreadsheets. Cost: Free for up to 1GB in uploaded files
    * MobileMe: Apple's service to sync email, calendars and contacts. Cost: $99 a year
    * Windows Live SkyDrive: Microsoft service to upload and share files. Cost: Free for up to 25GB of storage
    * Unifi: RealNetworks's service to catalog and stream media to multiple devices. Cost: TBD

—Source: WSJ reporting

The Silicon Valley company also is working on a revamp of the service that would also expand to multimedia files such as music and videos, people familiar with the matter have said.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

"Apple certainly needs to push its own locker service on the market," said Aapo Markkanen, an analyst at ABI Research.

"It's a big advantage to Amazon's music store if you compare that to iTunes. It could cause a lot of iTunes customers to swap to Amazon," he said.

Google, by contrast, has been a major backer of online software, including email and word-processing programs Gmail and Google Docs.

Last fall, the company launched Google eBooks, which lets users buy digital books and access them from Internet-connected devices.

The company is negotiating similar deals with music labels, and it has pitched to news publishers a project to sell content through mobile devices, people familiar with the matter have said.

Google didn't respond to requests for comment.

The philosophy underlying such efforts is not new. Some well-known music services have offered alternatives to buying song downloads, including Rhapsody International Inc.—which offers subscription downloads and streaming music—and the Internet radio service Pandora Media Inc.

Such services can be tough to create, though, because of concerns among record labels and music publishers about how copyrighted material is handled.

For example, Spotify AB, a European online-music streaming service, has repeatedly set target dates for a U.S. launch, only to miss dates after failing to secure music rights.

Among the issues for Amazon, industry executives and analysts say, is whether consumer should be allowed to store music they may have downloaded illegally in addition to adding new songs they purchase legally.

A number of other companies have set up online storage services of various kinds that have so far not had public disputes with copyright holders.

Examples include Amazon's Web services, EMC Corp.'s Mozy service, Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Live SkyDrive, Dropbox Inc. and a new service from RealNetworks Inc. called Unifi.

For its new consumer offering, Amazon argued Tuesday it doesn't need to negotiate new licenses from the music industry because its Cloud Drive is akin to a user storing files on an external hard drive.

The company hopes to profit from the new services by encouraging users to buy from its online-music store, which is integrated with the Cloud Player companion software that catalogs and plays songs.

It also offers paid storage plans for people who want more than five gigabytes of storage, which Amazon says holds up to 1,000 songs.

For example, it will charge $20 a year for 20 gigabytes of storage. One current offer: users get upgraded to 20 gigabytes of storage if they buy a music album off Amazon.

Users can save music files in the MP3 format that Amazon and others sell as well as the AAC format, which is the standard for Apple's iTunes service. New music purchased from Amazon and saved directly into the Cloud Drive wouldn't count against the storage limit.

While Amazon's service will work with Android smartphones or tablets, it doesn't work with Apple devices like the iPhone or iPad or Amazon's Kindle e-book reader.

The new storage service is part of a bigger mobile push by Amazon, which opened an online store to sell software applications for devices running Google's Android software, putting it in direct competition with Google's own existing app store and Apple's App Store for its devices.

Mr. Markkanen, the ABI Research analyst, said Amazon's model may appeal to audiophiles with large music libraries.

He said other users may prefer online-radio models, such as Pandora, or subscription music services that offer users access to a large library, such as Rhapsody or Spotify.

"They are simply more convenient and offer better value for money than models that are still based on purchasing songs and albums one by one, even if you store those purchases in the cloud," he said.

Facebook, Google, Zynga, Twitter Help California Recover

Thanks to a hiring binge within the tech industry, California is starting to see signs of an economic turnaround.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, the state added 96,500 jobs in February, the state's biggest one-month job gain in more than 20 years. In the Silicon Valley, 4,500 jobs were added and California's unemployment rate dropped two-tenths of a percentage point to 12.2 percent. Furthermore, this is the eighth straight month of job gains in the San Francisco metropolitan area.

"We're in growth mode. There's no question," said economist Stephen Levy of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, fierce competition for talented engineers, designers, computer scientists, data crunchers and other technical employees has led much of this growth.

"Every company in the technology industry is growing," said Josh Persky, who landed a new job at Causes, a San Francisco start-up, after getting laid off two years ago.

Indeed, Internet search giant Google said it plans to grow to more than 30,000 employees, increasing its workforce by 25 percent. Although Google does not disclose information on hiring, it has been said that this will be biggest round of hiring the company has done since 2007, when it brought on nearly 6,200 new workers.

This summer, Facebook will be moving to a 57-acre campus in Menlo Park, which can house 3,600 employees. Currently, the company has more 2,000 employees and has been growing at a rate of approximately 50 percent a year.

San Francisco-based Twitter has also been on a hiring binge. A year ago, the company had just 140 employees. Now with more than 400 employees, it plans to grow to 3,000 by July 2013.

According to The New York Times, with hiring so competitive in Silicon Valley, many companies are offering more than the typical free meals, shuttles and stock options that tech companies are known for. Furthermore, with so many ambitious engineers who would prefer to "do their own thing", many companies are taking it one step further by promising to help new recruits start their own business. Redfin, for instance, offers twice-monthly classes on entrepreneurship, a perk that the company says has helped recruit and retain top talent.

"It helps people stay but it also helps them to go," said Glenn Kelman, Redfin's chief executive.

At Square, not only does every employee have access to the company's product plan and financials in order to learn how to build a business, but co-founder and chief executive, Jack Dorsey, also gives employees 20-minute lessons on helpful topics such as how to raise venture capital.

However, despite the positive outlook and increased perks, San Jose Mercury News pointed out that California still has a long way to go. With 2.2 million still unemployed and most job gains concentrated on the coast, the state is still struggling.

"It's still a tale of two economies," said Levy. "The needle is moving for people with jobs in companies in the valley, with increases in wages and some hiring. The needle is not moving for the long-term unemployed."

'Father of Java' joins Google

James Gosling, the storied Sun Microsystems software guru known as the father of Java, announced Monday that he's starting a new job at Internet search giant Google.

Gosling parted ways with another Silicon Valley giant last April, resigning from Oracle just a few months after the commercial software maker bought Sun for $7.2 billion. Known in the industry as something of a free spirit, he later criticized the culture at Oracle, complaining to an interviewer that executives had cut his salary and micromanaged his work.

Oracle is now at odds with Google, charging in a lawsuit last summer that Google's Android software infringes on patents for the widely used Java development platform, which Oracle acquired when it bought Sun. In an Aug. 12 blog post, Gosling wrote: "During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer's eyes sparkle."

Both Oracle and Google declined to comment Monday on the hiring of Gosling. On his blog Monday, Gosling said of his new job: "I don't know what I'll be working on. I expect it'll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon."

Google Docs Spreadsheets Get More Sophisticated

A common criticism of Google Docs when it first launched was that it was primitive. Its word processor was barely better than WordPad, for example, which has been free with Windows since the 1980s.
In some ways this was part of Google's plan. Competing with Microsoft Office was desirable but only after they'd pulled the rug from under Microsoft's feet with Docs' killer feature: collaborative editing and document sharing. No need for an expensive Sharepoint server to work on docs with colleagues--all you need is a browser.

However, none of that stopped Google gradually introducing Office-like features as time has gone on. Recently it's added two features to the spreadsheet tool that--for me, at least--make the app a complete package.

The first feature is filtering. Sophisticated users shouldn't get their hopes up, however; the filtering is essentially AutoFiltering, as found in Excel, although a little easier to use. But it's not possible to filter via "greater than" or "lesser than" values, for example, or to apply additional sub-filters.

Those to whom spreadsheets are an undiscovered country should know that filtering provides the ability to sort data within tables, and also pick out data by row headings. Setting up a filter is automatic; once the filter button on the toolbar is clicked within a table (it's at the far right of the toolbar), Docs will work out the range of data the filter should be applied to, although filters can also be applied solely to selected columns.

For example, say you have a table in a spreadsheet displaying sales staff alongside the figures they've achieved for various regions. Applying a filter would allow you to hive off one or more individuals to examine their figures in isolation, or to sort the regional figures by smallest to largest (or vice versa) at a single-click. Crucially, none of the changes are permanent, allowing for flexibility, and the filter can be removed at any time; just click the Filter button again.

The second new feature lets you select non-contiguous ranges of data for graphs. Previously, it was only possible to create a graph by clicking and dragging to select a single range of data, or by specifying a range of cells that neighbored each other. However, it's now possible to create a graph containing data only at the top and bottom of a range of data, for example, or even to graph data in two separate areas of a spreadsheet, provided they're similar enough (meaning they have the same headings).

To do so, select the initial data and click the graphing button on the toolbar. Then click the Select Ranges link and, in the dialog box that appears, click the Add Another Range link. Then click and drag to select the new range. Repeat until all the data required is selected.

Now you can filter content in Google Spreadsheets.Now you can filter content in Google Spreadsheets. Also new to all Google Docs apps is the capability to convert older documents so they can be edited using the "new" Google Docs introduced this time last year, which allows real-time collaborative editing. The conversion button will appear as an option whenever any old document is opened, and there's a chance to preview the document to ensure the formatting remains intact. Google warns that there are some issues with how tables are handled, so previewing is probably a good idea.

Google describes the new spreadsheet features as being among their most requested, and it's not unreasonable to wonder why such essential functions have taken so long to arrive. After all, Google Docs' spreadsheets have been with us for five years now.

However, as the introduction of the new collaborative editing system this time last year proves, Google simply has different priorities for its Docs suite. There's nothing to be gained by recreating Microsoft Office online. Most people already have Office on their business computers and, even if they don't, they can get a compatible analog in the form of LibreOffice or OpenOffice. Instead, Google is introducing the power of the cloud to the office suite concept.

If you haven't taken a look recently, now's a good time to see what Google Docs can do for your business.

.Report: Credit Giants Team Up With Google to Drive Mobile Payments

The Mountain View, California, company is working on a partnership with credit industry giants MasterCard and Citigroup that would allow you to make real-world purchases at stores using your smartphone, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

If the partnership materializes, buying groceries may require little more than a wave of your smartphone across an installed card reader at the checkout counter.

The partnership would allow for cardholders to pay for retail items after activating an app on Android NFC-enabled smartphones. The phones could then be swiped liked credit cards across card readers enabled with near field communication, or NFC, at participating retailers.

As Wired’s Epicenter blog reported earlier Monday morning, Google will begin testing the mobile payments service in key markets — New York and San Francisco — within the next four months. Other test markets include Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington D.C., according to a report from Bloomberg.

Google would pay for the installation of thousands of NFC terminals in the major cities. The terminals will be built by VeriFone Systems, a manufacturer of point-of-sale electronic payment technologies.

As with many other Google experiments, the push into mobile payments would serve as a loss-leader for the company’s advertising business, sources told the Journal.

Google would be able to offer retailers more data about customers and purchasing habits, while tailoring its ad targeting and promotional offerings to smartphone users. The company isn’t expected to take a cut of the transactions.

The mobile payments initiative faces some challenges. Currently, only one NFC-enabled smartphone is on the market — Google’s Nexus S (above). Samsung’s successor to its popular Galaxy S smartphone, the Galaxy S II, boasts NFC capability, but isn’t slated for release until the summer of 2011.

Also, it’s been difficult to imagine a major disruption of a massive industry like that of the credit industry that’s already established. One big reason: companies like Visa rely on trunks — shared lines that provide network access to a series of endpoints rather than providing them individually — and leased lines to provide retailers with reliable credit card terminal service.

One attractive option to companies like Google and other mobile-payment startups would be to cut out the credit card companies completely. Instead of using the card companies’ private networks, mobile payment could be made over a given smartphone carrier network.

But any attempt to circumvent the credit card companies’ private networks over 3G or 4G access runs into the problem of network reliability. A wealth of frustrated customers unable to pay for a meal because of spotty network service is less than ideal for any mobile-payment initiative.

That’s most likely the reason why Google is teaming up with the major credit card companies, instead of trying to bypass them. And Google isn’t alone in doing so. Joint mobile payment venture ISIS — which finds AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile partnering up with Discover Financial Services — is Google’s main competition in the mobile payments arena. ISIS is reported to begin testing its payments network this year, according to Bloomberg.