Google Wallet is closing something and everyone's confused!

From Ron Amadeo

"Here is what's really happening. The "Google Wallet for digital goods" API is closing. The key word here is DIGITAL goods. This API was for in-app purchases for Facebook/Google+ games on the web.

• Not the PayPal competitor for third party stores selling physical goods.
• Not NFC for brick and mortar.
• Not Android in-app purchases or anything Google Play related.
• Not the Physical Wallet Card.

Here is a video of the thing that's closing: Google I/O 2012 - Monetizing Digital Goods with Google Wallet

It was mainly for social networks. No one plays Google+ games and Facebook has their own thing for payments."

The unfortunate state of mobile payments

From The Stanford Daily

“The history of mobile payments is, upon initial examination, a puzzling one. There are very few ideas in the tech industry that are as clear in their potential utility as user-friendly contactless payment. Enabling technology like near-field communication (NFC) chips has been available for years in both smartphones and retail registers. Mobile payments promised not only to deliver a better user experience, but also to lower the transaction cost for merchants, provide a timely opportunity to ditch the fraud-prone credit card system that has been with us since the 1960s and rethink payment security from first principles.

So why is the history of mobile payments littered with the corpses of ambitious challengers? In the 16 years since the founding of PayPal, why can we still not pay at the Safeway checkout counter with our PayPal accounts? Google Wallet launched over three years ago and to date has failed to achieve any meaningful market penetration. Infamous Stanford startup Clinkle set out to create a revolutionary mobile payment system and ended up shipping a glorified rewards credit card. Meanwhile, Square’s IPO dreams were crushed by the reality that it remains unprofitable.”

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Here's What's Going On With Google Wallet

From Business Insider

“At Apple's iPad event this week, CEO Tim Cook spent a chunk of the presentation talking about Apple Pay, its new mobile payments system that officially launches on Monday, October 20. Cook gushed about Apple Pay's partners — most major banks — and the more than 220,000 stores which will accept the service. The effect of Apple Pay, he said, will be "profound."

Google, which introduced its own NFC-enabled payments system through Google Wallet way back in 2011, was much less blustery on its recent earnings call when asked about Google Wallet.

"We are trying to get it right," Google's sales boss Omid Kordestani said in response to one analyst's question about Google Wallet.

Since launch, the service hasn't really taken off. However, with Apple Pay's hyped-up rollout right around the corner, Google Wallet will likely also see an uptick in usage as more stores install the NFC-enabled terminals needed to accept either "tap-to-pay" mobile wallet.

Kordestani insinuated as much on the call when an analyst asked him about Wallet's user adoption so far..”

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Apple Pay … same old same old …

Will Apple Pay be any better than what is already out there?

From The Economist

“Emptying pockets - Even Apple may not manage to replace wallets with mobile phones"

Try buying things exclusively via mobile payments and you will surely die, either of starvation or of a caffeine overdose. Coffee shops aside, hardly any restaurants or retailers allow customers to pay by waving a smartphone. That will soon change: on October 16th, just after The Economist went to press, Apple was expected to announce that, within days, the latest iPhone’s mobile-payment feature, Apple Pay, will start working in America. It lets users tap their phones on merchants’ terminals to make wireless payments.

Such technology has been around for years. It has failed to take off, however, in large part because so many firms have fingers in the mobile-payment pie, and often block others from grabbing a big piece of it. Google Wallet, a mobile-payment service that started up in 2011 to great fanfare, for a long time worked on only one of America’s four big wireless networks, Sprint. The other three have their own rival project, now called Softcard (it was named ISIS until events in the Levant forced a change). A consortium of big American retailers, such as Walmart and Target, also offers a mobile-payment service, called CurrentC, as does PayPal, whose main business is online payments. And then there are dozens of startups, from Stripe to Square, each with its own take on mobile payments.”

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