

Google Wallet Co-Founding Engineer Departs Google for Square  - hornokplease
http://www.nfctimes.com/news/google-wallet-co-founding-engineer-departs-google-square

======
27182818284
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.)

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

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

~~~
jrockway
Nobody really advertises, "capable of Google Wallet, but we won't let you have
it". That's the problem with letting the carrier own the phone.

The Galaxy Nexus is a pretty nice phone, Wallet or not, and I'm not sure if
anything else would have been as good anyway. Verizon's 4G network is better
than Sprint's, anyway. A reasonable tradeoff for what amounts to a novelty. (I
will need to carry my physical wallet until every store on Earth has an NFC
reader anyway.)

------
ChuckMcM
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>

------
joejohnson
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
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
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.

------
nextparadigms
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.

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

~~~
potatolicious
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.

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

------
funkah
Slow news day.

------
philip1209
Congrats to Jim

~~~
philip1209
(McKelvey)

