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Google CEO Confirms Online Payment System
didde writes "Reuters is reporting on statements that Google's CEO Eric Schmidt had made regarding Google's upcoming payment system. Apparently they're not looking to compete with PayPal." From the article: "Schmidt said Google does not intend to offer a 'person-to-person stored-value payments system' like PayPal's, in which money briefly resides in PayPal's control during the transaction, but he did not give details of how the Google system would differ."
and assume resonsibility for financial mistakes, i believe this is where Paypal are the scam, look like a bank but un-regulated and assume nothing
Because I'm starting an international chain of fast food hamburger restaurants, but I'm not looking to compete with McDonalds and Burger King.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
That's how I would design a system like this - and then 'disappear' to a tropical island.
Oops ... I said to much, didn't I?
*Disappears to a tropical island*
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Maybe they are going to offer Googlecoins as the first form of virtual currency?
diegoT
Paypal need a competitor.
I guess I don't understand how they can do this without the money at SOME point being in their control.
I mean, what else are we looking at?
"With GooglePay you write a check directly to the person you're paying, then write another check for 3% of that amount to Google. Easy!"
I wish we had a few more details.
On the surface it sounds a little like something that could evolve into the micropayment structure that could end spam.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I'm guessing and hoping that Google is going to introduce the first viable micropayment system on the web. If anyone can do it, they can.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Great, what I always wanted, a way for everyone to search for my financial transactions.
me: I transferred 100$ for his pog collection. Where did it go?
google support: But it's beta! And Beta means we can fuck up from time to time!
Also -- not competing with Paypal because they aren't going to store money? Sure, but won't google add that functionality the moment it becomes commercially advantageous? Not to mention the fact that I think for most people, an instanteous credit to your credit card (or bank account or whatever) when you get paid for you antique pog collection is not such a bad thing.
Final thought -- for every post in this thread complaining about the number of Google stories on /. -- God kills a kitten. What -- prove me wrong.
--Moiche
There is more than a fair share of people who just don't like PayPal... and there is a lot of brand strength in 'Google'...
... (relating to Google) ...
To quote nuke satellite monitors, "Confidence is high! Repeat! Confidence is high!"
===
Will it kill PayPal? No. Will it bite them a bit? To be sure. No matter what Google will use, as long as it offers a secure means for an online transaction, it will hurt PayPal... but they'll survive...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Schmidt said Google does not intend to offer a "person-to-person stored-value payments system" like PayPal's, in which money briefly resides in PayPal's control during the transaction, but he did not give details of how the Google system would differ.
Even though companies are out to make money and occasionally have to step on the toes of another company if they want to turn a profit, it's nice to see that not all computer business is so cut-throught. Maybe Google has realized that a little healthy competition is good, but more than likely they have slightly different aims or are trying to tie it in more with the rest of their services in a way that paypals method doesn't work.
Companies need to realize that crushing the competition and taking control of the market isn't going to be healthy for the consumer. Look at some of Microsoft's (Not to pick on them, but they're an obvious example) products like Internet Explorer. For a while it was the best browser around to many people, but after it gained control , Microsoft stopped upgrading it and fixing it, making it a rather sub-par product today.
To those of you who say that Google or any other company wouldn't fall into the same trap if they gained market dominance is plain ignorance. Go ahead and root for Google, Apple, Sun, AMD, or any other underdog company, but just remeber that they're as capable as being as evil and ruthless as some people feel that Microsoft, Sony, Intel and other industry leaders are today.
To quote the article "The payment services we are working on are a natural evolution of Google's existing online products and advertising programs, which today connect millions of consumers and advertisers"
So an advertiser can give you 5 bucks off if you buy from them. Or maybe reward points to use in the network.
If I used Google's payment system, would I be able to google for my missing micropayments? And how long would it stay in Google's cash -- er, cache?
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
I think it is important to put this in the "Google Mindset" if you will: Everything Google does is related to search.
They made GMail to allow you to store all your messages you ever send/receive and then give you a powerful tool to search through them.
Google Maps is just a nice compliment/interface to Google Local.
And the list goes on. So what can Google do to bring the power of search to a payments system?
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
Well, one improvement over PayPal would be global coverage. Just few days ago I was very impressed by a nice piece of software (mp3splt, BTW), and I decided to donate some money to the corresponding Sourceforge project via PayPal. Half way through I found out that my small European country (Croatia), was not covered by PayPal services.
I for one welcome our new Google overlords...
At the end of the day, you are happy because you got to read the article for $0.02, WSJ is happy because they didnt have to bother about managing subscription (which you were unwilling I assume) and still got the $0.018 and google of course, got the $0.002. Everyone comes home ahead. Many have tried micropayments, but if there is anyone who can do it, it is google
We need a Paypal competitor. Paypal needs a competitor like it needs a hole in the head.
This is damning to the banking industry. The age where they can get away with bank charges should be dead and burried. The idea that there are 10s of clerks monitoring each transaction, and therefore incurring a service fee is archaic and false. We are now paying to maintain a computer system, which if it was commisioned properly should have its costs covered by the interest they gain from investments they make with the money the hold for their clients.
In the UK at least, consumers are free to transfer money between accounts for free. But it takes between 3 and 5 days so they can gain interest (what were they doing the previous x days when it was in my account?). Businesses are routinely charged £0.20 a transaction and the transfers still take 3 to 5 days!!! How is this fair?
Banks have enough ways to generate money without charging buisnesses for micropayments.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Converting real cash into fake cash gives the fake cash a real value and thus makes it into real cash.
In other words, if I buy a Gbuck and send it to a friend and they convert it back to whatever it is worth in cash, how is this any different than what paypal does, realistically?
If they create their own currency and decide not to tie it in a fixed way to another currency, then that's interesting, but doesn't change the fact that it's still them accepting one currency for a temporary period of time.
It also introduces the problem of fluctations of the new currency. People buy Gbucks, wait for them to be worth more real bucks, then cash out. Google is now out a ton of real cash. This is done with real cash all the time, but making it easy to convert between currencies will make this simpler. Only way to combat this that I can see is for google to implement a conversion fee to stabilize the fluctuations, which will discourage the currency from taking off in the first place.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
*sigh*, I'm such a google fanboy it's not funny.
I can see a gmoney app - bye-bye quicken and ms-money. I could also see google starting a "virtual" bank -- no storefront, but you can still have an account (probably as a wholly owned subsidiary due to banking regs)..
But, what I really hope their new system might be... something to compete with paytrust (gpay?). I used to love paytrust, but through a series of aquisitions the website/app -- as well as customer service -- has gone downhill. Don't get me wrong, I still like and use them, but they've lost my loyalty as a customer.
For anyone who doesn't know -- paytrust is an online bill payment service, kinda like what your bank probably already provides. Except you can have all your paper bills sent to them, and they capture most of your electronic bills too, so that you can then send payments all from one place, schedule them to be paid automatically, etc.
Let's take SecondLife as an example. They have a monetary system in the game that allows you to convert dollars into their units of trade and transfer those units for goods. The sellers of the virtual goods can then transfer the units back to real-world cash. They aren't a bank, they're a game, and you're paying for extra "credit" in the game, not transferring money into a different unit.
If Google were to take advantage of that, we should consider what this would mean if we could hook it into email systems. Let's say you have to have an "account" with them in order to send email to me. I can set up accounts and give them to my friends. You have to transfer $.25 from your account to my account in order to send mail to me. If you aren't sending junk mail to me then I immediately refund the money. If you are, then I keep the money and eventually cash out the spare for my personal use.
White lists could be created for your friends to auto-refund their money. Blacklists would delete the spam before you see it, money staying in your account.
Voila, spam-proof email system. I'm liking this idea. Maybe I'll go write it myself...
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
It could be, but I'm finding it hard to imagine a micropayments strategy that couldn't be described as "person-to-person stored-value payments system".
Micropayments for reading articles are person-to-website rather than person-to-person, but the former would be adapted to the latter really, really quickly, at least if they allow anybody who sets up a web site to be a payee. But maybe not; I'll get back to that in a second.
And micropayments are usually "stored-value payments systems", because the best way to reduce the overhead is to give the central guys $20 and have them shift $.02 from one account to another (which is cheap) and only occasionally turning it into real money (which is expensive). Of course that's effectively what Paypal does.
Perhaps I'm misreading Schmidt's statement, but it just doesn't sound like micropayments to me. At least not generalized micropayments. You may be spot on with the limited notion, where the only valid payees are large corporations like the New York Times. It would still be a stored-payments system in all likelihood (you just can't charge $.02 to a Mastercard), but the asymmetry might make it profitable.