DANIEL SIEBERG: Hi there.
I'm Daniel Sieberg with Google Developers
Live here at I/O 2013.
And I'm joined right now by Peter Hazlehurst and Nik Sathe
from the Google Wallet team.
Before we get into some of the announcements that are
happening here at the show, why don't you guys tell me a
little bit about what you do.
First of all, I know that you have different roles, in some
ways, but you work together.
So tell me, first of all, Peter, what you do.
PETER HAZLEHURST: Sure, so I run the product side for
Google Wallet.
So my team's job is to build all the great apps, things
like NFC Wallet on your phone.
And the new thing we just launched, Pay By Gmail.
NIK SATHE: And my role, I'm part of the engineering
organization.
I try to keep Peter and his team honest, in some ways.
I'm mostly focused on the merchant and developers side
of the capabilities that [? we build. ?]
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK, great.
So let's dive right in to some of the announcements.
What is new with Google Wallet?
And what, in particular, was announced here at the show?
PETER HAZLEHURST: So at the show today and yesterday, we
announced three new things.
First of all we announced our instant buy STK for Android.
And that allows developers to make easy checkout options for
their apps for things like physical goods and services.
And the second thing we launched was also our new
Wallet Object APIs, so the ability to add things to the
Google Wallet like boarding passes, tickets, loyalty
cards, offers, things like that.
And then the third thing we announced, which was really
exciting, was our ability to attach money in Gmail.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Right, now we're going to get into some
of those a little bit more.
But tell me, are you thinking about expanding Google Wallet
into a platform, in a sense, beyond just
what it is right now?
PETER HAZLEHURST: Yes.
So what we're really shooting for is to try and broaden
Google Wallet so that it's no longer just tied to something
that you do on your phone.
It works across everywhere at Google.
So whether you're buying a subscription on YouTube or
paying for your new Google music through--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
PETER HAZLEHURST: --all access pass.
All of those things are powered by the Wallet.
So one time you add your credit card or your bank
account to Google, and you can use it everywhere.
So that's the whole focus of everything we're doing.
DANIEL SIEBERG: And how much of a challenge is that to
integrate all of those different
services and devices together?
I mean this is obviously something you guys
think about a lot.
PETER HAZLEHURST: It's been a really interesting challenge
because we've had a lot of different teams at Google with
their different going-to-market strategies and
different ways of wanting to charge people's cards and
stuff like that.
Plus, we also wanted to make sure it works on
all sorts of devices.
And that's been a real growth opportunity for us.
DANIEL SIEBERG: All right, Nik tell us about Google Wallet
Instant Buy.
What is that all about?
I mean I think the name obviously suggests what it
does, but talk to me about some of the partners that are
launching as part of that.
NIK SATHE: Sure, so what we saw was that the Play Store
does a great job of allowing application developers on
Android to monetize in app digital content.
But there really wasn't a good solution for merchants that
were actually selling physical goods on Android apps and
other capabilities.
Increasingly, we've seen this is not just online merchants
with an app, but even people like Uber, one of our launch
partners, where are you complete the transaction and
pay for it on your phone even though the goods and services
are actually delivered in the physical world.
So we're seeing a lot of those sorts of crossover use cases,
and those are the merchants that we believe can really
benefit from Instant Buy.
From a merchant's standpoint, one of the biggest problems
with conversion in mobile checkout has
been abandonment rates.
Where there's just too many clicks, too many keystrokes
that you have to enter.
It's a pain in the ass.
And I think that it's one of those things that all of us
would love to see happen better.
And we've created a capability combined with Gplus sign in
the ability to have much, much fewer clicks.
And we hope that we'll reduce the abandonment rate from, I
think, it's around 97% according to one survey that
we recently saw down to something where it's as little
as a couple of clicks, and you're right through a
checkout process very easily.
DANIEL SIEBERG: You mentioned Uber.
And I know a lot of folks in the Bay Area rely on it.
Even in New York, I know there's people all over the
country and in the world, frankly, thinking about how
that ties into their getting around needs.
And what I've noticed, to me, it's
almost a no-click situation.
I mean it's so seamless, when you make that payment, you
forget that you're making the payment.
Which I think is great.
I mean it removes that kind of friction or barrier.
And I guess that's a great example of that.
Are there other partners you can point to?
NIK SATHE: Yeah, I didn't want to leave anyone out.
I actually wrote them down.
But we had 11 partners that have already integrated the
App Store available on the Play Store to download and use
integrated with Google Wallet, Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia,
The Fancy, GoPago, Tagstand, Uber, Tabbedout, Wrapp,
Priceline, and Rue La La.
So those are the 11 partners that
launched with us yesterday.
A lot of them, actually, are in this kind of crossover
space where you're making a reservation online or on your
mobile device, but you're actually staying in a hotel or
renting a car or whatever it happens to be in
the physical world.
From a merchant's standpoint, what they've told us was that
this integration is really easy.
They don't pay any new fees to us.
The capability we provide is a value added service without
charging them.
They still continue to process their credit card transactions
the same way that they would.
And, hopefully, we'll be able to show that conversion uplift
with some of our case studies have
already shown is happened.
DANIEL SIEBERG: So, Peter, let's move on to Attach Money
in Gmail which was announced yesterday.
Before we came on the air here, you mentioned what
somebody had said about it as an announcement.
What did they say in terms of the
announcements here at Google?
PETER HAZLEHURST: Yeah, we got some great feedback.
One of the quotes we got was, it's the craziest new thing
we've heard at Google I/O all day.
So that was really exciting.
And I think what we did, which was kind of fun, is rather
than just blast out a new feature to everybody, we've
launched it virally.
And the way it works is the only way you get the feature
is if someone sends you money.
And so to jump start the ecosystem, we have all the
Googliers in the US, and then yesterday, I sent $10 to every
one that was at I/O with a US account.
And so if you have a friend, and you want access to it,
find someone who's been at I/O, and it's just going to
grow like this virally.
Until we get really, really comfortable, and then we'll
make it available to everybody.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Which was kind of how Gmail got it's
start in a way too.
PETER HAZLEHURST: Yeah, they had an
invite model, five users.
That sort of thing.
DANIEL SIEBERG: So walk me through it.
I mean, earlier we agreed that you we're
going to send me $1,000.
As I recall--
PETER HAZLEHURST: That's right.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Just to demonstrate this.
It hasn't happened yet.
So I don't know if there's sort of a delay, or--
PETER HAZLEHURST: Actually, interestingly enough, you
picked $1,000.
We have a whole bunch of really cool security that's
designed to protect consumers' accounts.
And one of the things we look for is really out of the
ordinary things.
And it would have known that I shouldn't
have sent you $1,000.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Interesting.
PETER HAZLEHURST: And it's probably just being blocked.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Yeah, yeah, sure.
It's being held up in some way.
But just walk me through how it works.
PETER HAZLEHURST: So, let me tell you how it works.
It's deceptively simple.
In Gmail we have the new compose bar.
And you know down at the bottom where there is
attachments, so you can attach a photo or a document or link
something from Gdrive, that sort of thing.
If you've got access to the product, you'll just see a
little dollar sign.
Click on dollars, pops up, says OK, would you like to
send $10, $100, whatever you want.
As long as you have Google Wallet, it'll either show you
if you have a balance because you may have already received
some money before.
And once you add your name, you'll see a nice, beautiful
Gplus thing so that you can make sure that you're really
sending it to the person you expect to.
And then you hit send, and it's done.
Five seconds later, you're going to receive the email,
and it's going to say great, here is $10 from Peter.
If you don't have a Google Wallet yet, or if you're on
Hotmail or AOL or something like that, there's a call to
action to go to Google and get a Google Wallet.
And then the money will be deposited.
And so there's a little bit of a process for the first time,
and then after that, it's all instantaneous.
So if I send it to you, you get it in one second.
DANIEL SIEBERG: I see.
So it's not tied to somebody opening the attachment, or
reading the email, or anything like that.
It's just as soon as you send it, it's there.
PETER HAZLEHURST: That's right.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's great.
So who do you think is going to really
capitalize on using this?
I mean sending money to each other or friends or something
is one idea.
But from a business standpoint, where do you think
this is going to lead?
PETER HAZLEHURST: So in the short term, we focused on the
consumer side.
We had a lot of small businesses and big businesses
say, hey, can we start putting merchant stuff through this?
And we were like hey, hang on guys.
Let's focus on the consumer.
And so our sort of scenarios that we see a lot of is people
saying, hey, we went out to dinner last night.
Can you send your share?
Or I'm renting an apartment in the city for the holidays, you
guys want to chip in?
And all you have to do is reply, yeah, here's my $50.
And it's frictionless.
It's just built into that social engagement that Gmail
is really working well on.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's fantastic.
That's really cool.
PETER HAZLEHURST: You can imagine us sticking it in
other parts of Google services where there's a lot more of
those interactions.
And so we're going to work on that over
the rest of the year.
DANIEL SIEBERG: It seems like a ton of potential for
something like this.
Now Nik, I want to get into the types of things that you
can store in Wallet because tell me about all of the
things, I guess, that you can store in Wallet.
Which leads me to the question of what can
you store in Wallet?
NIK SATHE: So when we designed the Wallet Objects API, our
intention was to create a very flexible data model that
basically allows developers' imaginations to dictate what
gets stored in the Wallet.
So the basic platform is one that provides just name value
pairs with some templating capabilities so you can define
how you want these things to look and be
stored in the Wallet.
We went one step further than that for two areas.
The first being loyalty, which in many cases or memberships
in general, they are the key engagement vehicle for
merchants to engage with their consumers.
And the current process is very broken.
We all have tons of loyalty memberships, and we don't
really use them because we don't carry around a stack of
cards like that.
Other than Peter and I who actually have a second wallet
that has all of our loyalty memberships, and that's what I
want to get rid of.
And the additional things that we've focused on in loyalty is
adding some semantic definition to that object and
some additional capabilities like leveraging the data that
we already have about a consumer in their account, in
their Wallet to do instant sign up.
So a merchant can actually have their program discovered.
I can walk into the Marriott down the road, which is where
we're staying, we will, based on location and timeliness,
surface that as, hey, maybe you
should sign up for Marriott.
If you already have one, we'll show you the
card that you have.
If you don't have one, we'll surface it.
And say, hey, sign up today, and Marriott could offer them
a 1,000 point bonus to sign up instantaneously.
It's one click, you're done.
And merchants get much, much better data because in most
cases Wallet accounts have gone through some loyal
customer validation.
So we have verified data about a customer, there's no more
Elvis Presley and Mickey Mouse ending up in people's systems.
And the second area that we've done more with is offers
where, again, we've added semantic definitions.
So like one of the fields that we have is an expiration date
for an offer, and the system automatically recognizes that
and does alerts and notifications to consumers
saying, hey, you have a coupon that's about to expire.
We expected to take those two types and extend them into
other verticals mostly driven by the developer community and
what they tell us is important.
But we'll focus mostly on commercial objects.
We already have a partner, BillGuard, that's doing
something very interesting with the more generic
capabilities that the platform provides.
Where they have a back end fraud detection system, you
register your credit cards with them, and they send you
alerts and actually transaction records.
And it's actually a very beautiful interactive
experience right there in your Wallet.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's great.
And offers also showing up in the Maps experience too
because people are searching for pizza or coffee, and they
get that increasingly suggested to them
as part of the new--
PETER HAZLEHURST: That's right.
So one of the cool things we focused on in the Wallet is
making it possible for all those things you would
normally carry with you, but either you forget or you just
say, it's not worth it to carry that gift card.
I'm never going to use it again.
We let you bring that into the digital cloud with Google, and
then we'll surface it to you on your phone or on the web or
in Maps at the right place and at the right time.
So you never forget that thing that you had that is going to
create value for you.
And it's this continuous experience.
And what Nik was talking about is we're starting off with
some really obvious things like loyalty cards and offers,
and then as the developer community grows, we're going
to pick up those key categories and make them more
first class things in the Wallet.
Tickets is a really obvious one.
We've got a lot of interest from movie theaters and stuff
like that that they want to be able to have the ticket so
that when you buy it through Instant Buy online, you can
also then just have the bar code on your phone.
Well [INAUDIBLE]
you actually come into the movie theater, scan your bar
code, keep going, don't talk to anyone, you don't need to
do credit cards.
It's all just magic.
DANIEL SIEBERG: That's awesome.
Well, so, we're running out of time here.
But if people want to learn more about all of this whether
from the merchant's side or the consumer's side,
where can they go?
PETER HAZLEHURST: So, I think our website's up and running
and it's developers.google.com/commerce.
DANIEL SIEBERG: OK, guys, well, Peter and Nik, thank you
both so much for joining us.
This is some great information.
PETER HAZLEHURST: We're really excited and looking forward to
seeing how things grow.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Don't forget that $1,000.
PETER HAZLEHURST: $1,000, I'm on it.
DANIEL SIEBERG: I'll give you my Gmail later.
We'll talk.
PETER HAZLEHURST: Great.
Thanks very much.
DANIEL SIEBERG: Thanks guys.
That's going to do it for now here at
Google Developers Live.
Stay tuned for lots more content right here.