San Francisco

Thanks to Bay Area-based startup Cataloupe Systems, Google Wallet is once again expanding its reach, this time with NFC-enabled vending machines.

According to a report from All Things D, The startup has already installed Google Wallet-powered payment terminals in roughly 6,000 vending machines across Chicago, the mid-Atlantic region, and San Francisco. A good start, but a fraction of the approximately six million vending machines in the U.S., 80,000 of which Cantaloupe is responsible for.

While credit card payments among users tend to be much less for lower priced items due to transaction fees, the company plans to offset those concerns with coupons and rewards delivered to users through the app. Users will also be able to send real-time complaints and possibly even requests for particular products to be included next time the machine is restocked.

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The search monster’s developer conference dubbed Google I/O has been a runaway success this year, bringing us a series of major product announcements ranging from Chromebooks and the new version of the Chrome browser to Ice Cream Sandwich news and Honeycomb tablet software. Google last month said Google I/O 2012 will be running from April 24-25 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, but they decided to extend the event and push it back two months, citing “an unexpected opportunity to extend Google I/O to three days”.

According to a post over at the official Google Code blog, the company made it known that it is moving the conference to June 27-29, 2012. The event will still take place at Moscone Center West in San Francisco. Surprisingly, the Moscone Center events calendar displayed at press time a two-day rather than a three-day event booked for June 27- 28 and the original ‘corporate meeting’ scheduled for April 24-25 is still up on the site.

Those interested in attending can vote for a Day 3 agenda at this page. The company wrote in the comments of a Google+ post that registration for Google I/O 2011 will open in February.

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Google has acquired San Francisco based startup Apture, for an undisclosed amount AllThingsD reported today. Aperture is a downloadable browser plugin that presents users with contextual information from sources like Wikipedia to match the current webpage they’re on.

A Google spokesperson told AllThingsD, while they’re not only after Apture’s product, they’re after Apture’s talent to add to the Chrome team.

There’s no word on what the team will actually do inside of Google, but it would be cool to see this technology implemented somehow. Aperture raised $4.1 million in venture funding before being acquired by Google.

A Peet’s Coffee in San Francisco (what happened to NYC?) is showing a Google Wallet logo beneath its original MasterCard PayPass NFC reader.

It appears that there is minimal upgrade to get Mastercard PayPass systems upgraded to be Google Wallet systems.  In fact, from the merchant standpoint, it may just be upgraded signage.

That’s good news for Google and its rollout plans.  PayPass locations are all over the place and Google wants to hit the ground running.

As of March 2011, more than 92 million MasterCard PayPass cards and devices have been issued for use at approximately 311,000 merchant locations worldwide, including new acceptance environments such as vending, taxis, tollbooths, transit, football/baseball stadiums and golfing events.
In addition to robust deployments at major merchants in the US such as McDonalds, 7-Eleven, CVS, Duane Reade, Sheetz, Hess, Wegmans, The Home Depot, Best Buy, Gulf Oil, Sports Authority, BJ’s, Meijer’s, Whataburger, Tim Horton’s, Shop-Rite, Foot Locker, Sunoco and BP.PayPass has been rolled out in 37 countries. Outside the US, PayPass speeds consumers through the checkout process at  McDonald’s (US, Poland, UK), Burger King (Turkey, UK), 7-Eleven (Australia), Starbucks (Turkey, Malaysia, UK), Petro-Canada (Canada) Tim Horton’s (Canada), Boots (UK), Tesco (UK), Carrefour, Cora and Intermarche (all 3 in France) and in many other types of merchants including supermarkets, cinemas, gas stations, fast food and transit.

Google is expected to release Google Wallet officially today and has created a very amusing ad (if you are a Seinfeld fan), below.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0XLL86e1FU]

Google today released a new bottom-floating toolbar for Internet Explorer and Chrome users (no Firefox?) called Google Related.  They explain it like this:

Google Related is a browsing assistant that offers interesting and useful content while you are browsing the web. For instance, if you’re browsing a page about a restaurant in San Francisco, Google Related will assist you by displaying useful information about this restaurant such as the location of the restaurant on a map, user reviews, related restaurants in the area, and other webpages related to San Francisco restaurants — all in one place.

Whenever you’re navigating to a new page, Google Related will look for interesting related content and, if available, display it in a bar at the bottom of your page. Google Related can display categories such as videos, news articles, maps, reviews, images, web sites and more. To preview a listed item or see additional items, just use your mouse to hover over different categories in the bar. For example, when you hover over a video link, the video pops up in a preview box and you can play the video directly on the page.

This is an interesting move that will likely get a lot more clicks through Google…if it catches on.
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While Google Offers has been available in Portland, OR for sometime, Google has today launched offers in New York and San Francisco. Google Offers gives users daily deals on local items and services, just like GroupOn, Living Social, and GILT City. To start using Offers, locals can sign up on the Offer’s website or use the Google Shopper Android app.

Google also announced that Offers will be on its way to Austin, Denver, Washington D.C., Boston, and Seattle soon. See any good deals?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHKum7fidIk]

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Google’s annual developer conference is due tomorrow, May 9, 2001 in San Francisco at 9am Pacific Time. In the run-up to the event the company has created a nice web-based timer clock at the official conference site, sporting a cool dot-matrix display that counts down the remaining hours, minutes and seconds until the event. With each passing second the passing numbers fall apart into dozes of dots that bounce off the screen bottom – that’s the power of HTML5 for  you.

Expect a host of product announcement and new features at this year’s conference which, by Google’s own words, will be focused on Android and Chrome. We’ll be keeping a close eye on pricing and availability of first Chrome OS notebooks. Developers are probably keeping their fingers crossed for a glimpse of what’s in store for the next Android operating system update.

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