News Round Up

So mobile has been doing a lot of interesting things recently. Per my initial forecast a few months ago, there is this trend of consolidation happening (among banks mostly) to provide mobile payments. So let's do a mini news roundup: (will post an ISIS-specific round up shortly, since crazy things are happening there)

1. Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan chase created a new service called ClearXchange that would allow online and mobile customers to send money via text and email messages. It seems that ClearXchange is their way of edging in on the PayPal P2P payments section. Noticeably missing from this conglomeration are issuers (like Visa, MasterCard), traditional alternative payment providers (PayPal) and potentially new payment providers (Google, Apple).... wonder why?(see bullet #2)
2. Google recently introduced the Google Wallet! This new service, introduced at Google's New York office, is a free Google app that lets users download and tap to pay from participating merchants.They expect 50M users over the next few years and is expected to do additional trials in San Francisco, with planned expansion in "additional cities and smartphone [platforms] in the future". Additional vendors will include Coca-Cola vending machines (does that count as a merchant?), CVS, Jack in the Box, Sports Authority and Sunoco
3. Google also has a bunch of other tricks up its sleeve. It introduced location targeted news near you, which they creatively  named "News Near You". The service analyzes every word in every story to understand what geographic area the article addresses and where the source is located. It then will provide a section at the bottom of the homepage with customized news suggestions for you- bringing data analytics to a whole new level! Personalized news sources?
4. "Across the pond", Orange and BarclayCard introduced a new NFC service this month spanning over 500K merchant locations. Orange's new Samsung Tocco Lite device will incorporate Barclaycard's new QuickTouch solution, and in addition to tap and pay functionality, users can also Orange subscribers can also transfer money to their phones to fund their mobile purchases