Posts tagged with "google"

Google Wallet May Work with Future NFC iPhones

Earlier today Google officially unveiled Google Wallet, the company’s first foray into the near-field communication payment market, based on an app capable of running on the Nexus 4G device and backed by names like Citi, First Data, Sprint and MasterCard. Through the usage of an NFC chip for mobile phones and the Google Wallet app for Android, users will be able to pay with real money from a credit card or “Google Prepaid Card” just by tapping on screen and saving a new transaction. The system is currently being field-tested by Google and will launch publicly this summer in the United States, furthermore it will also support Google’s new Offers platform for special deals and discounts as well as MasterCard’s already deployed PayPass terminals.

Google Wallet has been designed for an open commerce ecosystem. It will eventually hold many if not all of the cards you keep in your leather wallet today. And because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will be able to do more than a regular wallet ever could, like storing thousands of payment cards and Google Offers but without the bulk. Eventually your loyalty cards, gift cards, receipts, boarding passes, tickets, even your keys will be seamlessly synced to your Google Wallet. And every offer and loyalty point will be redeemed automatically with a single tap via NFC.

As Google is stressing the open nature of its commerce ecosystem, MG Siegler at TechCrunch reports someone at the media event today asked Google’s VP of Commerce Tilenius if the Google Wallet app would eventually run on NFC-enabled iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices, getting a surprisingly promising answer:

Today, during their Google Wallet/Offers unveiling at the NYC headquarters, Google touted the openness of their new system. Naturally, someone asked a question about what this meant for other, non-Android phone?

“In terms of iPhone, RIM, Microsoft — we will partner with everyone,” Google VP of Commerce Stephanie Tilenius said. Of course, that depends on two things: 1) the inclusion of NFC chips in their phones. 2) the willingness to work with Google on this system.

Of course, considering all the rumors surrounding Apple’s NFC implementation for future iPhones and iPads, it is very likely that Apple will rely on its own payment system based on iTunes accounts or external collaborations with credit card companies, rather than allowing Google to become the preferred system for NFC payments on the iPhone. So while Google is promising today that their app could run on a variety of devices and that they want to partner with everyone to extend the ecosystem, it remains to be seen whether or not Apple will let them release a Google Wallet app for iOS. TechCrunch also reports Google mentioned a “sticker” that could be attached to any device to enable NFC functionalities, and when tapped on another NFC terminal would allow for payments through Google’s cloud, and the Wallet app. Of course, the app would still need to be approved in the App Store or, perhaps, work as a webapp.

Apple was initially rumored to be implementing NFC in the iPhone 5 set for release this Fall, though more recent reports claim the feature will come in future iPhones, not necessarily the one supposed to ship later this year.

Google Completely Revamps Maps on Mobile Browsers

Announced a few minutes ago on the official Google Mobile Blog, the Maps web app for iOS and Android devices has gone under a major update that enables new features and menus when viewed on mobile browsers. As Google reports, 40% of Maps usage happens on mobile browsers, and that’s why the company decided to update the maps.google.com website to offer a more consistent experience across smartphones and tablets. The changes, however, are exclusive to the web app and we can’t see anything new on the native Maps app for iOS, which uses Google’s backend but is developed by Apple.

The new Maps website displays a bar on top to get your current location, enable and disable layers like satellite, labels, traffic and points of interest, and another button to get directions to a specific location or learn more about places that support additional information and photos (like restaurants). Provided you give Safari access to your location, you can easily get directions as you would on a desktop browser, sign out of your Google account and access the “My Maps” interface from Google.

Now, when you visit maps.google.com on your phone or tablet’s browser and opt-in to share your location, you can use many of the same Google Maps features you’re used to from the desktop.

The new features include:

  • See your current location
  • Search for what’s nearby with suggest and auto complete
  • Have clickable icons of popular businesses and transit stations
  • Get driving, transit, biking, and walking directions
  • Turn on satellite, transit, traffic, biking, and other layers
  • View Place pages with photos, ratings, hours, and more
  • When signed into your Google account, access your starred locations and My Maps

You can try new Maps mobile website by heading over to maps.google.com on your iOS or Android device. Check out more screenshots below. Read more

Search Ninja Gives Your iPhone A Better Web Search

If you’re familiar with Swearch, a neat iPhone web app that allows you to search for a specific query on multiple websites at once, then you’re most definitely going to be interested in Search Ninja, a $0.99 app that allows you to flick through search engines, star search results, and start typing in seconds to find exactly what you’re looking for. Search Ninja’s concept is simple, but the execution is powerful in the way it meets a user’s expectations when it comes to mobile search. Upon opening the app, you’re immediately greeted with a Google search field, and the iOS keyboard ready to type. No need to tap on buttons to start searching, no need to do anything before performing a regular Google Search. If you, however, want to customize the search experience and have those extra seconds to make sure you’re navigating to the right webpages, Search Ninja features an intuitive swipe interface to switch between search engines in seconds. Both on the main screen and in the embedded web view, you can swipe to change from Google to Bing, Twitter, Wikipedia, IMDB, Youtube, Flickr and many, many more. You can even add other engines if you really feel like your favorite one is missing, although the process requires a 2-step wizard screen.

Two features I particularly appreciate about Search Ninja are favorite searches and the History section. They’re very straightforward, but come in handy if you find yourself looking for the same things on your iPhone over and over, or simply want to look up an old subject again.

Search Ninja strikes me for its simplicity and clean design. Gestures to switch engines are a plus, and a very useful one. Get the app here at $0.99.

Music Beta by Google: Mac Uploader, Flash, iOS Safari Playback

At its I/O conference earlier today, Google officially announced a new cloud service called “Music Beta” which, similarly to Amazon’s Cloud Player, allows users to upload their music collections and playlists to the company’s servers, and play them back anywhere on a web browser, tablet or smartphone. Like Amazon, Google’s service has a few limitations for now: it doesn’t come with a native iOS app as it’s only got an Android app for compatible smartphones and tablets, it requires Flash in some sections of the website and it’s restricted to US access only. Music Beta is, well, a beta product by Google, and it’s free for now – Google didn’t mention how much uploading and streaming 20,000 songs once the service hits stable status will cost you.

As detailed by MG Siegler at TechCrunch, Music Beta comes with a native Mac uploader that can look through your iTunes library and playlists or hard drive contents to find songs and albums to upload. On desktop browsers, MG Siegler says Flash is required for playback as indeed a screenshot of a technical error seems to prove, whilst Cnet claims Music Beta can stream songs on iOS devices as well, without Flash, using Mobile Safari. It was discovered a few days ago that Amazon’s Cloud Player quietly rolled out iOS Safari support, and it’s unclear at this point whether Music Beta really works on iPhones or iPads, meaning Flash is only required for some transitions and animations. As more users are invited to try the product, we’ll make sure to check Mobile Safari compatibility. Read more

Apple’s Guy L. “Bud” Tribble Explains Location Tracking at Senate Hearing

At a U.S. Senate hearing this morning entitled “Protecting Mobile Privacy: Your Smartphones, Tablets, Cell Phones and Your Privacy”, Apple’s Vice President of Software Technology Guy L. “Bud” Tribble offered his remarks about Apple’s privacy policy, location tracking system implemented in iOS devices and App Store app control, reiterating many of the points already explained by Apple two weeks ago in the Q&A on Location Data.

As summarized by AppleInsider, Tribble testified before Senate members that Apple doesn’t collect personal information about its users nor does the company share any information with advertisers – rather, the cache file that was discovered by security researchers (which was incorrectly large in size and backed up to a computer during the sync process) is meant to store information about nearby cell towers and WiFi hotspots to enable iPhones and iPads 3G to quickly get signal without having to rely on real-time GPS data all the time. This is a crowd-sourced database that Apple keeps in a small amount on every device as an offline cache – personal data and device identifiers are never sent to Apple, Tribble explained.

Sen. Al Franken also asked both Apple and Google representatives at the hearing whether the two companies could add a fixed privacy policy to their app marketplaces to ensure users always know how their personal data is being treated, and what’s going on behind the scenes of an app. Tribble replied a privacy policy in App Store apps wouldn’t be enough as users are likely to skip that every single time – and that’s why Apple believed that adding actual graphical elements to the user interface would be a better, and more elegant solution to inform users about the usage of Location Services. In iOS, an icon in the status bar indicates when an app is sharing your location; every app must ask a user to share his location through a dialog box; in the Settings, users can revoke location access on app-by-app basis and manage other location preferences as well.

Tribble also went on to explain Apple does random audits on App Store apps and follows the tech press and iOS community to find out which apps are violating the privacy rules:

The Apple executive also detailed how his company conducts random audits on applications to make sure they’re playing by the rules. He admitted that Apple does not audit every single one of its 350,000 iPhone applications, just like it would be impossible for the federal government to audit every single taxpayer. Apple also keeps an eye on blogs and its “active community” of application users for potential violations. If a violation is discovered and the issue cannot be resolved, applications will be removed within 24 hours and the developer will be notified.

In most cases, Tribble said, developers quickly correct the issue, as they want to keep their application available in the App Store.

Tribble was joined today by Google’s Alan Davidson. A video of Senator Franken’s opening statement is embedded after the break. Read more

Apple Overtakes Google And Becomes World’s Most Valuable Brand

A new survey on the value of brands has placed Apple as the world’s most valuable brand, ending Google’s four-year reign at the top of the list. The ‘Brandz’ survey, done by global brands agency Millward Brown, found that the Apple brand is worth an estimated $153 billion, which was an 84% increase from last years survey.

Global brands director of Millward Brown, Peter Walshe, said that Apple’s pointed to a number of factors that has led to Apple’s rapid rise in brand valuation. He said that their meticulous attention detail and presence in corporate environment were two of the reasons that they have behaved differently to other consumer electronics manufacturers and went on to say:

Apple is breaking the rules in terms of its pricing model. It’s doing what luxury brands do, where the higher price the brand is, the more it seems to underpin and reinforce the desire. Obviously, it has to be allied to great products and a great experience, and Apple has nurtured that.

Technology and telecommunications companies generally dominated the list, with Apple (1), Google (2), IBM (3), Microsoft (5), AT&T (7) and China Mobile (9) holding six of the top 10 spots, sharing it with the old-heavyweight brands of Coca-Cola (6) and McDonalds (4). Meanwhile Facebook entered the top 100 at number 35 this year, with a valuation of $19.1 billion.

The survey is done by Millward Brown essentially observing the value that the companies put on their own brands in their earnings reports and analysing it in conjunction with the results of a survey of more than 2 million consumers.

[Via Reuters]

Google Chrome Canary Lands On OS X

With an unexpected move that was reported earlier today by MG Siegler at TechCrunch, Google decided to (finally) release Chrome Canary for Mac. The new, highly unstable and cutting-edge version of Chrome is available for download here. What made Chrome Canary the proverbial unicorn among Mac users is the fact that this version of the browser is considered a pre-developer build – a step above Chromium, but an anticipation of things to come in the Google Chrome Dev, Beta and Stable channels. Available for several months on Windows, Canary is, put simply, the Chrome version to use if you want to see the latest developments, and try early features that will be implemented on other Chrome channels at a later date. Canary is not meant for daily, stable usage – instead, it’s best to run it alongside a beta or stable Chrome installation.

The Google team writes on the official Chromium blog:

The Mac version of Google Chrome Canary follows the same philosophy: it automatically updates more frequently than the Dev channel, and does not undergo any manual testing before each release. Because we expect it to be unstable and, at times, unusable, you can run it concurrently with a Dev, Beta, or Stable version of Google Chrome. Your Canary data remains separate, but if you set up Sync in each version of Chrome that you use, you can automatically continue using the same set of bookmarks, extensions, themes, and more.

The current stable version of Chrome is labelled 11; meanwhile, the Dev and Beta channels are already using version 12, whilst Canary has already made the jump to version 13 – the one that’s going to come out as stable in at least a couple of months from now. But if you want to test the latest features and experience the bleeding edge, Canary is awaiting here. With a shiny new yellow icon.

Android Strides Ahead In US Smartphone Market Share

A new market survey by Nielson in the United States has shown Android drive ahead and gain 37% of the smartphone market share, a strong 10% margin over Apple and the iPhone which sits in second place at 27%. The figures show a significant change since the last Nielson survey, done in October that had the iPhone with the largest smartphone market share at 27.9% and BlackBerry in second place at 27.4%. Android has largely absorbed the 5.4% market share BlackBerry lost as well as the decreasing share of Symbian and older Windows Mobile devices to go from 22.7% in October to its 37% market share in March.

The survey also revealed that Android is now the most desired smartphone operating system for consumers, with 31.1% of consumers surveyed saying they would choose an Android phone compared with 30% who would go with an iPhone. In both the market share and desired operating system, Android is showing significant increases whilst Apple is seeing minor reductions compared to others such as BlackBerry or Symbian.

A final aspect of the survey was what recent smartphone acquisitions were and it reveals that 50% of all new smartphones purchased were running Android, whilst 25% were iPhones and 15% were BlackBerry phones. It is worth noting that this survey was solely focused on smartphones and as such did not include reference to the other iOS devices such as the iPod Touch or iPad. Jump the break for two more graphs.

[Via AllThingsD]

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Google Brings “Undo” Bar To Gmail iOS Web App

With a post on the company’s official Mobile blog, Google announced a few minutes ago that they’re bringing the popular “Undo” action to the Gmail web app for iOS and Android devices. You can check out the new feature by opening mail.google.com on your iPhone now.

Sometimes when I’m using Gmail on my phone, I delete a message by mistake or label it incorrectly. Sure I can fish the message out of my Trash or remove the label and apply the correct one, but that takes several steps. Even just a few seconds is usually enough time to catch those annoying mistakes.

The new Undo feature works with labels, archived and deleted messages, as well as moved messages or conversations. Undo appears in the same bottom bar that Google added a few weeks ago to display the status of a mobile connection. It all works fairly well, and the bar stays on screen for a few seconds even if you move to another section of Gmail – like starred items from the Inbox. Google also recently brought Priority Inbox to mobile devices through Safari, although support for Retina Display graphics is still nowhere to be seen.