Tag: predictions

Social Payments: the Future is Unified

Physical credit cards will soon be a thing of the past. Is the rest of the US startup industry ready?

The next real-world cash-replacement could be powered by Facebook, Google, Apple, Square, Intuit, Paypal, or some other company hiding in the wings.  There are a few obvious names in there, and then there are a few left-field ones to some people. This post isn’t about how those left-field plays could happen. I simply wanted to explain how the landscape is changing.

There’s a convergence happening right now between social, payments, and e-commerce. Imagine this predictable future:

You buy some coffee at Starbucks. You take out your phone and swipe it at the terminal. Your [insert phone app name here] Bucks (from here forth known as: “Phone Bucks”) are deducted from your account. Your purchase is optionally posted on your Facebook/Twitter stream. You get highly-targeted Groupon-clone notice for a Starbucks coupon redeemable online immediately. You decide to buy it using your Phone-Bucks — no signing in, no additional authorizations — by clicking a button.

We’re talking about a future where your online wallet (today, known as Paypal, Facebook Credits, etc.) follows you into the real world and ties directly into your mobile phone. This represents a single unified wallet. And it makes sense. That’s the future. That’s where we are headed now. I’ve been watching this trend happen for the past few years, and it’s exciting to finally see some big players waking up to this reality. Which players are the closest to achieving this? In this order:

1. Facebook – Due to its large install base (virtually all smartphones) and an existing currency platform (Credits), they are best positioned to move into the real world. And they recently made a huge move indicating a desire to do exactly this (creating a subsidiary is the first step in buffering liabilities that come with real-world payments).
2. Square (or Intuit depending on how things play out) – They would solve this from the other direction: they have a stronger real-world presence, and moving into the digital space might be easier than vice-versa.
3. Google – They will approach this from the platform (Android) by opening it (Google Checkout 2.0) up to developers and creating an ecosystem. They also recently stole a key exec from Paypal, so you know they’re serious.

It’s my belief that any startup entering the e-commerce landscape right now needs to make sure they are thinking about this convergence. To get big valuations, I think a startup needs to not only understand these trends but be the first to market in the new paradigm that will be coming (really soon!). This convergence will create an opportunity for new players to emerge and destroy existing leaders. All mobile startups around commerce, Groupon, Paypal, and even the advertising arm of Google are probably already adjusting to these trends. Is your startup?

Think about it.

Google’s Real Goal Behind All Their Free APIs

Ever wonder why Google gives away so many web-developer tools? Tools that otherwise seem like complete money-and-bandwidth-pissing schemes (notice how most of these don’t directly show ads):

This is all about obtaining browsing behavior in a long term bid to increase ad efficiency. Nothing else.

  1. It is not about making things more “open”
  2. It is not about making web development easier
  3. It is not about making an online operating system
  4. It is not about competing with Microsoft
  5. It is not about making the Google brand more ubiquitous
  6. It is not about showing ads in new places

If any of these above things happen, they are a (likely planned) side effect. For example, if a particular API makes something easier, that is good because it will encourage other developers to adopt it as well. But as I will explain shortly, the commonly held beliefs about Google doing Good or Google making the web more open are simply not the reason for these initiatives.

If you notice, all of their APIs use JavaScript. This means all of their APIs have the ability to note what computer a given request is coming from. This means that on top of your search preferences, they can eventually begin to correlate your browsing habits based on the sites that you visit that use Google APIs.

For example, if my blog were to use a YouTube embed, it would be possible for Google to read a cookie originally placed on your machine by YouTube and correlate it as traffic coming from this site. This means they can uniquely track every YouTube video your computer has ever watched since the last time you cleared your cookies. YouTube is just an example because most of Google’s APIs are far less obvious to the end user. For example, the unified AJAX libraries could be used by a good half of the “2.0” websites out there without impacting performance (and in many cases would make the sites load faster for the end user). But because everything is going through Google, it’s possible (although I’m not saying that are) for them to track which sites you visit.

If this isn’t extremely valuable information, I don’t know what is. Don’t forget that the AdSense API is, in itself, a means for Google to track every website you’ve ever been to that uses AdSense, and for a way for Google to know exactly which type of ads interested you in the past. Once they know what sites you visit, they can surmise what a given site is about, and then determine, for example, what sort of products would interest you.

It’s the classic advertising chicken and egg problem: If I knew what my customers wanted, I could sell it to them, but they won’t tell me.

…And Google found the chicken. For the time being, they haven’t started using this information (at least noticeably), but I am sure they will as market forces move to make competition in that area more necessary.

Say goodbye to privacy. =( Oh wait, I’ve been saying that for quite some time now.