Google vice president of payments Osama Bedier demonstrates how Google Wallet will work. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP
Google’s first payments from its new “electronic wallet” system may be to the online transaction company PayPal, which claims that the company and two of its executives stole trade secrets for the project.
Unveiled on Thursday, the Google Wallet project uses a technology called Near Field Communications (NFC) to allow contactless transactions between consumers’ phones and merchants’ terminals.
But PayPal has filed suit in California following the launch in New York, alleging that Google lured away PayPal executive Osama Bedier earlier this year to obtain trade secrets that are now being used in Google’s service. The suit also names Stephanie Tilenius.
I’m not sure if this is stupidity, laziness, or a mix of both, but check this out.
Back when IE7 launched, Yahoo! created a customized version and began to market it to our existing IE users. The “splash page” looked like this:…
Today it seems that Google has similar intentions. So similar, that they decided to basically copy our page and slightly Googlify it. If you look, the design, layout, and most of the text are the same!
First, it was with their sidebar on the left. Next, it was having a wallpaper on your home page. Then, it was testing full-screen results. After that, it was showing results that included social data in an incredibly similar way to Bing (in relation to the recent announcement of Bing and Facebook being in cahoots but not to be confused with Google Social Search). Now, Google appears to be rolling out visual previews (called “instant previews”) of sites such that users can see them prior to clicking through to them. Personally, I think Google’s rendition of the feature is quite nice but it lets me know that we shouldn’t be so quick to count out Bing.
