Hasta La Gadget!

Microsoft has seen the future of personal computing, and it’s a world with a single Windows ecosystem. Windows Phone head honcho Andy Lees — who said that we won’t be seeing WP7 on tablets during Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference yesterday — still sees slates, phones, consoles, and PCs playing together in perfect harmony. His plan is to provide users with a consistent experience across all Microsoft-powered devices, though he didn’t flesh out exactly how this singular ecosystem will work. Given recent evidence indicating Xbox integration in Windows 8 and the UI similarities between the forthcoming desktop OS and WP7, it seems that Microsoft is well on its way to a consolidated future. But, only time will tell if Mr. Lees’ can deliver us from fragmentation with a unified Windows.

Microsoft’s Andy Lees on Windows’ future: one ecosystem to rule them all originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jul 2011 21:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung’s Nexus S is currently the only smartphone capable of NFC transfers in the U.S. (Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)

Silicon Valley wants you to do away with your old, beat-up leather wallet.

PayPal introduced its money transfer widget at the MobileBeat technology conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. PayPal’s new widget uses Near-Field Communications technology, which lets you pay for purchases with a wave of your smartphone.

PayPal’s widget allows for money transfers between two NFC-enabled phone holders. Say you want to transfer money to another PayPal user. They’ll request a specific amount of money from you on their phone, and after you tap your NFC-enabled phones together, the cash transfers from your PayPal account to the other.

“PayPal used to be an online company, but we see the majority of transactions are being substituted for offline transactions,” said Laura Chambers, senior director of PayPal’s mobile division, at the MobileBeat conference.

The mobile payments space is booming at the moment, with companies like Google, Intuit, Square, and of course the eBay-backed PayPal all competing for share over customer transactions. And all of them offer something a bit different. Google’s Wallet service will eventually let you pay for goods with a wave of your Android smartphone, while companies like Square aim for the small-business crowd who want to accept payments from their mobile devices. Intuit offers services similar to Square, but you’ll be able to manage your taxes and sales info with integration into its existing QuickBooks accounting software.

PayPal’s money transfer offering is a relatively small step into the mobile payments space, and the company faces lots of challenges. For one thing, there’s only one NFC-enabled phone available in the U.S. — the Samsung Nexus S. Second, PayPal’s offering isn’t as major as Google’s: PayPal allows transfers between phones, while Google is pushing for installations of NFC-capable point of sale terminals in retailers around the country. So where PayPal lets you trade digital cash with a buddy, Google wants you to be able to buy items from stores.

PayPal isn’t taking kindly to its competitor. The company is suing Google over two of its former employees, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius. Both jumped over to Google in the past year to work on its mobile commerce initiative, Google Wallet. PayPal says Bedier had access to top PayPal secrets which he then shared with Google, violating his contract. Tilenius is also in violation of contract, says PayPal, because of recruiting Bedier.

Google debuted its wallet over a month before PayPal’s NFC transfer widget.

Chambers acknowledged the challenges, reminding that NFC is still in its infant stages.

“The barrier is less on the consumer side, as all the OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] say this is what they want to do,” Chambers said. “It’s expensive for merchants to integrate the hardware.”

But the technology is coming — eventually.

“No doubt that NFC for mobile payments is finally gaining some traction in the U.S.,” said Phillip Redman, mobile analyst for Gartner research. It will be some time before mobile payments are standard, but no doubt, one day they will be, even in the U.S.”

Chambers agrees. “Probably by the end of next year, maybe early 2013, we’ll start to see critical mass,” Chambers said.

The company isn’t hedging all of its bets on NFC alone. Last week, PayPal bought Zong — a mobile payments company that allows you to bill your purchases to your wireless carrier bill — for nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.

And not wanting to be cut out of the loop, wireless carrier companies are also dipping toes into the mobile payments waters. In a joint venture created last year dubbed Isis, T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T first aimed to create an alternative payments system which bypassed credit cards and allowed you to pay for items with your smartphone. Your stuff would then be billed to your mobile account, no credit cards necessary. But instead of defying the powerful credit card companies, Isis recently scaled back its efforts this year, opting for another form of ‘digital wallet’ instead.

PayPal’s NFC widget will debut later this summer. Check out the video below for how PayPal’s new transfer widget works.

PayPal Uses NFC to Make Peer-to-Peer Payments Easier Than Ever [PayPal]

Discovered a world of possibilities lately? Someone has, as the BlackBerry App World has just soared past the one billion download mark. It took a smidge over two years for the company to claim the milestone, if you count both smartphone and PlayBook tablet purchases. Android Market took about the same amount of time to reach the mark, but has soared to greater heights since, while Apple has averaged nearly a billion downloads per month in each of the last six months. A number of factors have likely led to the relative snail’s pace in the BB storefront, including the outfit’s rocky relationship with developers. In what can be seen as a morale booster, the company has begun a video series that allows seasoned RIM aficionados to offer their rationale for working with the mobile OS. Perhaps this will, in theory, help expedite the milestone conquering — only time will tell.

BlackBerry App World hits one billion downloads, finally originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Square card reader allows anyone with an iPad or smartphone to accept credit card payments with a single swipe. Photo: Lisa Wiseman

SAN FRANCISCO — What’s better: A piece of software designed specifically to run on one device, or a web-coded experience that can be accessed on any gadget equipped with a browser?

Keith Rabois, chief operating officer of mobile-payments startup Square, says going ‘native’ — or using devices with apps made specifically for one platform — is crucial when launching an application on a mobile device.

“If you care about the user experience…it’s almost impossible to deliver that with a non-native application,” said Rabois at the MobileBeat technology conference on Tuesday.

The debate between web-based apps versus those made for specific platforms has been long and heated. Companies like Apple have proprietary coding languages (Cocoa and CocoaTouch) tailored to its iOS mobile platform. So for example, if a developer decides to create an app only using Apple’s code, you’re not going to see those apps on any devices besides Apple’s; if you’ve got an Android phone, you’re out of luck until the developer studio ports it over to Google’s platform.

HTML5, however, offers an alternative to programming in a native, platform-specific language. Using open, freely accessible web development protocols, programmers can write in HTML5. That means any device you own that runs with a browser — be it desktop or mobile — can access the content.

Google is especially pushing the web-based tools, as HTML5 content is searchable by Google’s crawling indexing systems — that means you’ll be able to look for what you want in a Google query. And the very popular internet radio service Pandora launched its HTML5-powered version of its site on Tuesday as well.

But there are disadvantages in going with HTML5. There’s often noticeable speed decreases in accessing browser-based content, as well as problems with utilizing other parts of a phone or tablet’s hardware (like Bluetooth, for example). Essentially, you’ll be missing out on some of the cooler features specific to, say, an Android or iOS device.

And of course, there’s the curated, centrally located application markets like Android’s Market and Apple’s App Store. One quick stop at either offers you a buffet of application choices. Payments are also streamlined, as Apple has your credit card info and Google offers direct-carrier billing options. With HTML5 browser-based content, you may have to enter all of your payment info over and over again each time.

“Being installed with an icon on an iPad is pretty damn important. People see my iPad all day long,” said Rabois. “They don’t necessarily see a computer screen all day long.”

Rabois echoes the philosophy Square has taken in its approach. The app is available in both the Android Market and Apple’s App Store, and is focused on smaller merchants who opt for mobile-based points of sale rather than a traditional cash register.

Created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, in May of 2010 Square debuted its card reader, literally a square-shaped plastic dongle, which attaches to both Android and Apple smartphones, as well as the iPad and iPod Touch devices. After installing the Square app software on your device and going through a brief identity check, you’re up and running, ready to accept credit card payments from customers.

Square has been active in the mobile payments space. In May, the company launched Square Register, a software interface built specifically for merchants to track their inventory and sales from their smartphone or tablet. On the customer side, Square also launched its ‘card case’ software, which literally lets you pay for items with your smartphone at retailers using Square’s Register software. The company has registered “hundreds of thousands” of merchants, and has processed over $66 million in transactions in the first quarter of 2011.

Google also launched a mobile payments initiative recently with Google Wallet — a virtual wallet which stores your credit card information on your phone, and uses Near Field Communication technology to interact with point-of-sale terminals through a simple wave of the smartphone.

Companies like Square and Intuit, however, have an advantage over Google, as NFC technology isn’t quite mature yet. “Near Field Communications might take a couple of years to roll out fully,” said Matt Marshall, founder of the technology blog VentureBeat, at the MobileBeat tech conference on Tuesday.

And unlike the infant NFC technology, Rabois says native apps are growing more and more responsible for providing content to users, catching up to the Web at a faster pace. Rabois claimed 33 percent of searches on Yelp — a local merchant and retail recommendations service — came from the ten percent of iOS app users with the Yelp app installed.

Ultimately, installing apps on our mobile devices is becoming more of a personalized experience, according to Rabois — moreso than the web.

“The decision to install an app is partially utilitarian, and partially self-expressive,” Rabois said. “It says something about myself.”

Former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, the guy who resurrected Palm, is leaving HP’s Palm unit (no longer called Palm, to boot). Taking over is Stephen DeWitt, HP’s U.S. computer overlord. This isn’t good for webOS. In fact, It’s terrible. More »