Google Wallet Co-Founding Engineer Departs Google for Square

http://www.nfctimes.com/news/google-wallet-co-founding-engineer-departs-google-square

by hornokplease • 14 years ago

56 28 14 years ago

I was really excited for Google Wallet, so much so that I bought a Galaxy Nexus.

Guess what? Verizon blocks it. If Google doesn't want to fight for their product, why should their co-founding engineer stick around? Happy he is off to Square. (I'm not so much grumpy at losing a specific payment option I'm grumpy at one of the few companies with enough force to lean on Verizon capitulating. New tech gets slowed and I get sad.)

lonnyk4• 14 years ago

I did the exact same thing and have the exact same resentment. Now I am stuck with a GIANT phone for 2 years.

CrazedGeek• 14 years ago

If it helps: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1365360

wmf• 14 years ago

Didn't y'all know that Google Wallet was blocked before you bought the phone?

Steko• 14 years ago

If you're unhappy with it you needn't stick with it for 2 full years. Many iphone users like to stay on the latest model and have found that the Early Termination Fee if often not that much more (if any) then the Ebay value of phone.

For example here is completed listings for Verizon 4G Galaxy Nexus:

http://www.ebay.com/csc/i.html?LH_Auction=1&LH_ItemCondi...

One sold this morning for $390 incl a couple extras like car charger etc. If you bought in December your cancellation fee later this month will be $350 - (5 * $10) = $300. Now obviously that's not a free phone you're going to be out some money you laid down but you also can wait a bit more.

Cherian_Abraham• 14 years ago

You know its pretty easy to install the GoogleWallet.apk file on it, and be up and running with GW in under five minutes?

_pattern• 14 years ago

why would verizon block it?

jsz0• 14 years ago

All the US carriers besides Sprint are backing the ISIS payment system. They've invested tens of millions of dollars into ISIS. They aren't going to let Google walk in and eat their lunch when they have the power (granted by Google ironically enough) to simply shut them out of the market. You can still side-load Google Wallet but it's DOA without wide support so it doesn't really matter.

redwood2• 14 years ago

Not to mention capitulating on net neutrality to win over verizon...

joejohnson• 14 years ago

Why wouldn't Square want to work to make their payment platform accessible through multiple channels (NFC, their dongle, mobile-to-mobile, etc.)? Just as they should develop for many of the big software platforms, they will probably need to have product offerings that allow payments in multiple ways.

enra• 14 years ago

You can already just pay with the app, which I think really is the best way since it doesn't require any special hardware for the customer.

Of course only problem is the penetration of Square registers.

rdl• 14 years ago

I don't have any insider knowledge of Square specific to this, but it's not that hard to make a shim for a PoS to do all sorts of stuff. I contracted for a company in 2003 which did NFC/RFID readers with a little magnetic shim for existing magstripe card readers. You can also integrate at a deeper level directly into the PoS -- there is some customization needed, but a lot of it is generic.

erikpukinskis• 14 years ago

I'm sure they want to, but I'm also pretty sure they won't. At least not soon.

The thing that has struck me most consistently about Square is the brilliance of their restraint. Surely their endgame is to displace plastic cards. But they realize that what matters at this stage in the game is buy-in from consumers and merchants.

So where Dwolla and FaceCash go straight for the Brass Ring of a modern payment infrastructure, Square instead chose to provide a service that, while antiquated, is MASSIVELY useful in a broad range of retail scenarios.

Once they have the marketshare, which they get by leaning on the crutch of credit cards to enable the usability and usefulness of their product, they can just swap in a more modern payment backend, and voila... They win.

But the key is restraint, and focus on the current needs of merchants, and NFC is not.

pagekalisedown• 14 years ago

Just part of the normal turn over when you have more than 32,000 employees.

potatolicious• 14 years ago

Doubtful. I've been in the same spot myself and eventually also left that employer - it's incredibly painful to be enthusiastically dedicated to a project and see it go nowhere. Worse yet, it goes nowhere because upper management is unwilling to throw their weight into it.

Eventually you get fed up and leave for a company that has a track record of actually pushing hard in the field you're interested in.

jrockway2• 14 years ago

Is Google Wallet really not going anywhere? Who else lets you make NFC payments in the US today?

funkah• 14 years ago

Slow news day.

philip12092• 14 years ago

Congrats to Jim

philip12092• 14 years ago

(McKelvey)

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Meanwhile, Osama Bedier is still a VP at Google and now an advisor to Mezz [1] a startup which, if he signed the same employment agreement the regular folks sign, means he probably will be moving on from Google shortly. (My personal experience is that Google pretty much considers any outside work a conflict of interest)

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/mezz

nextparadigms2• 14 years ago

Why isn't Google buying Square anyway? They really need a popular payments platform to integrate with Android. I realize they might not want to sell now, but maybe they want to sell it for a good price.

Google Wallet Co-Founding Engineer Departs Google for Square

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