Google Checkout -- the Unofficial Blog

Google's Future Plans: Indexing All Sheep in the Universe, Crop Circles, and Micropayments :)

Apparently, there's this huge whiteboard at the Googleplex that acts as a freely editable blueprint of the company's masterplan. Anyone can contribute to it sort of like an old school wiki. The plan has ideas that range from wacky crop circles to possible like a child care "kinderplex" to very probable: micropayments.

(Via InsideGoogle)

Meg Whitman on Advertising with Google and Skype's Pay Per Lead Potential

I just discovered an interesting CNBC video interview with Meg Whitman, eBay's CEO. The interview took place about a month ago and sheds light on some interesting facts about eBay's relationship with Google and a potential new Pay-per-lead pricing model.

On Advertising with Google:

Reporter: Are you the largest advertiser on Google? 
Meg:  I don't know if we're the largest but we're certainly in the top 2 or 3

Reporter: Did pricing go up or down during the course of the quarter for you?
Meg: The average cost per click went up somewhat but we were able to offset that increase by smarter buying across the 10 million keyword portfolio that we manage every single day at eBay.

On the Pay Per Lead Model:

When asked about how her company will benefit from Skype's acquisition Mrs. Whitman said that you would be able to pay for the value-added Skype services using your PayPal wallet. She also mentioned that Skype will soon be integrated with eBay owned marketplaces later this year.

Meg goes on to say that she's looking very closely at a Pay Per Call business that will follow a Pay Per Lead model as opposed to the usual Pay Per Transaction model that everyone is familiar with on eBay.

Currently eBay takes a listing fee when someone posts an item on the site and also a transaction fee when the seller receives the money for a sale. eBay could extend its services to include a third type of fee that we'll call, say, an "inquiry fee". A potential buyer calls the seller (through skype) to ask questions, or bargain, or ask for shipping details.

It's interesting that eBay and Google seem to be going towards the same goal from two opposing directions.

Google has already started a test version of its pay per call ad model on its search engine results pages. It is getting ready to launch a pay per transaction model pending the official launch of its GBuy payment service.

eBay on the other hand has been doing pay per transaction all along. It is going to launch a pay per call service pending the integration of Skype toward the end of the year.

Here's the video again. The interesting stuff is toward the end.

(image courtesy of Time Inc.)

Gbuy & Trogdor: How a Google Website Editor Can Drive Adoption of Gbuy

According to Valleywag, a Silicon Valley rumors blog, Google has a secret project codenamed Trogdor. Trogdor is a webpage editor (like front page or dreamweaver) that enables developers to create easy Ajax-based webpages.

This editor would be a good support to the gbuy product. Small merchants, usually web entrepreneurs with some technical skills, have two ways to receive payments on their ecommerce site:

• Integrating with the payment processor's API through SOAP, Get requests, POST requests, etc. This requires realtively advanced technical skills like server-side scripting, sessions management, etc.
• Creating a link or 'html code snippet' and adding it on their webpage. A customer would click on the link, get redirected to a page hosted by the payment provider, complete the payment, and then redirected to the merchant's webpage.

The second option is the easier one in terms of programming skills. And it usually entails copying and pasting code from the payment provider's website to the merchant's page. The task of creating and managing those links gets tiresome after a while.

If the webpage editor is connected in some way to the payment provider then it would make it much more convenient to the merchant to manage those links.

In other words the merchant would be able to create a new product (listing its name, price, description, etc) straight from the editor and get the appropriate link immediately by clicking on a button.

Payment providers have done something similar in the past. For example PayPal offers plugins to popular website editing programs to make the task of integrating payments easier. But they never went as far as creating a complete editor from the ground up.

This move should make it easier for Google to grab the rightmost part of the web merchants long tail: the many merchants with low-volume transactions.

(image courtesy of Wikipedia )

Gbuy / Google Payments - a Ten Page Strategy Report

Here's a ten page report that I wrote about how Google's Gbuy service or Google Payments fits into the company's overall strategy:

                                 GBuy_Google_Payments.pdf

Here goes more poker rules and strategies

Some Thoughs About Why Google and Skype are Investing in Fon

On Sunday news went out that FON is getting funded by Google and Skype. The two other companies participating in the deal are Sequoia (a Google investor) and Index Ventures (a Skype investor).

How it works.

FON is a Spanish company that was started three months ago by a serial entrepreneur, Martin Varsavsky. Its goal is to create a wireless network using a bottom up approach: by giving an incentive for regular people to share their internet connections with others.

So the person can either share their internet connection for free in return to getting access to other people's networks. Or they can charge money for users to use the network. In both cases the person can choose how much of his bandwidth he would like to make available.

To become a fonero you can either download a free piece of software to install on top of your wireless router. Or you can purchase a $25 router right from the company. They say that they're selling the routers for half price to encourage participation.

The Business Model

There are three players in the game. The Fon company, the Foneros, and ISP's.

Let's start with the Foneros. Fon has a 'fun' way to divide its users into three groups:

• Linus foneros give away their bandwidth for free. In return they get free access to other people's internet for free. Ring a bell?
• Bill foneros charge people to use their wireless.
• Aliens are people who are not sharing or selling their wireless. For
  example someone who doesn't have internet access at home. This person
  can have access to the free fon network for a short period. But he has to start paying after pay after 120 days of usage. Where does the alien's money go? It's split two ways between Fon and the ISP's.

What's in it for Google and Skype?

Fon seems like a great idea except for one major hurdle. ISP's usually forbid users to share their bandwidth with others. I'm sure that a good chunk of the investment money will go into hiring savvy biz dev people to convince ISP's to jump on the wagon.

But other than that there's a lot of goodness for both Google and Skype.

Skype is a voip service that by definition works on top of the internet. Devices from notebooks to PDA's to phones are being shipped with wifi inside. So you could in theory install Skype on top of any one of those devices and talk to people around the world either for free (if they have skype) or for a very small fee (through SkypeOut). The problem is that at the moment you have to be at your office or at a wifi hotspot to be able to use the service. If Fon succeeds in making the network ubiquitous then Skype will as a side effect become the platform on which people communicate.

Google has some big wireless plan of its own. But remember AdSense and AdWords are Google's cashcows. What if instead of the 'Bill' Foneros charging users a small fee to access their wifi, they could give out access for free and get paid whenever a person who is connected through their router clicks on a Google-powered ad?

Fon is a great complementor to Googls and Skype. In addition it's a given that both companies have a lot of cash laying around and this seems like a better way to invest than putting the money in a bank.

The GPay / Google Payments Connection

Skype has a sister company called PayPal. While Google will soon release Google Payments or Gbuy, its own version of a payments product. Both companies would love to increase their subscriber base. Fonero could be one way of doing that.

Stories, Rumors, Comments?

I would really appreciate any tips, stories, or just plain rumors about the Google payments product. Send them to david.haddad on gmail.com. Thanks!

It's Jeff Jordan Vs. Eric Schmitt

The WSJ has a free article about how PayPal is bracing for the fight against Google's upcoming payment product.

Call it gpay, google payments, google wallet, google money - Jordan (PaypPal's chief" doesn't believe Schmitt when he says: "Google doesn't intend to offer a "person-to-person, stored-value payments system".

I do. Google is focused on business to person and not person to person. So the Geek-in-chief is being truthful.

Other highlights from the article:

• "Mr. Jordan has been marshalling his forces for a possible battle with Google".
• "Mr. Jordan also accelerated the development of some products to stretch
  PayPal's lead in online payments and increased product-development
  spending by as much as fourfold in some areas"

Read the analysis that I wrote back in November 05.

The WSJ article in full: PayPal Prepares For a Challenge From Google.