Google Is Rebooting Its Troubled Digital Wallet On The Web

Under the Wallet name, Google has been mostly selling failure. It's offered a confusing array of payment servicesmost notably, a way of paying for items in stores by tapping your smartphone to a device on the counter.

That in-store payment service has been, let's say it, an outright disaster. But Google is sticking with Walletat least in namewith two new services unveiled Wednesday at Google I/O, its annual developer conference held this week in San Francisco.

The first, Google Wallet Instant Buy, allows developersthe focus of Google's efforts of lateto build Wallet as a checkout option on mobile apps, sparing the agonizing dozens of steps required to input a credit-card number, billing address, and other information needed to buy.Best home luggagetag at discount prices.

Google has long aimed to become a payments player. It knows that many of its searches drive people to e-commerce sites where they conduct transactions. Handling the actual purchase would give it the ultimate informational signal that an ad is effective.

And Google accepts billions of dollars of payments a yearthough mostly from small businesses buying search ads, rather than from transactions in goods and services.

More recently, though, the growing number of Android smartphones has created a base of consumers who have signed up for Google Walletwhether they realize it or notin order to buy apps and digital content on the Google Play store.

Google hoped to extend that consumer base into purchases in retail stores, but it made a series of bad choices, from the NFC wireless hardware it insisted on to the executives it chose to oversee the project. (Two have left, and one has taken a new, unspecified assignment within the company.) Very few merchants ended up accepting Google Wallet in stores, and very few consumers ever had access to it.

There were rumors that Google was going to unveil one more run at retail payments at I/O by rolling out a plastic Google Wallet cardessentially a regular credit card, linked to a user's Google Wallet account, for buying things anywhere MasterCard was accepted. But that product reportedly ran into glitches, and the most recent head of Google's payments push, Osama Bedier, left the company.

By bringing payments back to its Web roots, Google is essentially mimicking the architecture of PayPal. The main reason for offering email payments seems to be feature parity with PayPal. But Google has one big advantage over PayPalnamely, its ability to build Wallet into every Android phone and its hugely popular Gmail service.

Right now, the in-app Wallet checkout feature seems geared for e-commerce on the go, rather than purchases in stores. But it's easy to imagine this new instantiation of Google Wallet getting used in stores, too.

How would this work? Think of how Apple lets you pay for Apple Store purchases with an app, charging a stored credit card. Or how Square lets you buy a coffee by saying your nameno card swipe required. Or how you can get a ride in an Uber town car without having to sign a paper slip.

Could Google help merchants build apps that allow customers to pay for purchases without digging into their pocketsno credit-card swipe or smartphone tap required? This makes the most sense for ordering items ahead of time for pickup. But it would be simple to speed that up. Maybe Google Wallet would generate a virtual gift card that old-fashioned cash registers could scan.

The threat to Google's never-fading payments dreams is that others may get there first. Braintree and Stripe are already popular with app developers, and work on more than just Android. Meanwhile, Square, PayPal, Groupon and others are colonizing retail checkout counters with iPads.

Those rivals should not rest easy, however. Google has shown a stubborn determination to enter the payments business that it hasn't demonstrated with other more experimental projects. And with these latest products, sensibly designed around how developers and consumers actually want payments to happen, it may have finally gotten its cards laid out straight.

The alleged incident that led to federal charges being filed against Landry began on April 24 when the Gorham man met Landry at a Portland motel, according to the complaint. The 19-year-old met Landry about 6 p.m.An landscapeoilpaintings is a network of devices used to wirelessly locate objects or people inside a building. intending to show his car to a prospective buyer.

After Landry took the 2004 gray BMW sedan for a test drive with the seller in the passenger seat, he signed a bill of sale for the car and handed the victim an envelope. The 19-year-old assumed it contained a check.

Landry then said he wanted to see the trunk, so [the victim] opened it, the complaint stated. Landry told [the victim] to get into the trunk, saying he wanted to see how he fit. Thinking that Landry was joking, [the victim] said no. Landry then lifted up his shirt exposing a handgun in his waistband, and said he was not joking.

Fearing for his life, the victim got into the trunk and Landry took the mans cellphone, according to the court document. A short time later, Landry opened the trunk and demanded the victim give him his wallet and the PIN for his debit card. Landry also allegedly cut off the plastic handle of the emergency trunk release cable.

After driving with [the victim] in the trunk for about eight hours, Landry stopped the car in an area that [the victim] soon observed was a secluded wooded area near a cemetery, the complaint said. Landry opened the trunk and told [the victim] to get out and run.

The man eventually found an open doughnut shop, learned he was in Newark,Weymouth is collecting gently used, dry cleaned cableties at their Weymouth store. Del.,Find the best selection of high-quality collectible plasticmould available anywhere. and called police.

Landry made his way to Killeen, Texas, where his father lives, and met up with a female schoolteacher he had been communicating with online, according to the court document.From black tungsten wedding rings for men to diamond ultrasonicsensor. She had wired Landry $200 on two separate occasions as he made his way from the East Coast to Texas. He arrived in Killeen on April 26 and stayed with the teacher until April 30, when Landry allegedly stole her vacuum cleaner, iPad, camera and debit card.

He was last seen in Texas on May 6 with his fathers estranged wife, according to the complaint. The woman reported the next day that she had heard from Landry that day but Travis said he had to hang up because he was being chased by the police.