Paypals Mobile Honcho Osama Bedier Jumps To Google

PayPals Osama Bedier, vice president of platform, mobile, and new ventures is leaving to join Google in a similar position, according to sources close to the situation. Bedier, one of PayPals longest-serving employees, has been busy trying to catch the company up on mobile payments.

The move by Bedier underscores the importance of mobile payments and shows how big a battleground it will be. Google has been pushing near field communications and the company recentlyenabled NFC in its latest version of Android. Google is also looking atbuilding its own mobile payments system. Google has been struggling to come up with a competitor to Apple (a AAPL), Amazon and PayPal.

Mobile payments haveattracted millions of dollars in funding is poised to be a gold mine.According to some estimates, by 2014, mobile payments will be a $633 billion market. Bedier will certainly help Google crystalize its mobile payments work and should help the company make a push to be a major player in the area. Its also a nice pick-up after seeing a number of executives jump recently.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription reqd):


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

China Watch: Magical New Maglev, Fire the Ambassador?

Image
A list of what the Wall Street Journal’s reporters in China are reading and watching online, periodically updated throughout the day. (NOTE: WSJ has not verified items in the ‘News’ section and does not vouch for their accuracy.) Last updated: 7:22 pm Beijing time. NEWS: Chinese scientists at Southwest Jiaotong University have developed a model maglev train that runs in a vacuum tube and can travel as fast as an airplane, the Global Times reports . Whether it will ever be put to use is another question, with one expert quoted in the story calling the train “complete scientific fantasy.” The first of two planes sent to retrieve up 480 Chinese nationals stranded in Egypt has landed in Beijing, Xinhua reports . Meanwhile, Hainan Airlines today dispatched another plane to pick up some of the 300 or so who remain in Egypt. It’s not clear from the reports if all of them will fit on the third plane. CNET interviews theater/tech geek Mike Daisey, creator of “The Agony and the
Keep reading

Live Blog: GMIC G-Startup Competition 2011

Image
Technode team today is covering Global Mobile Internet Conference, both in Auditorium 1 with keynotes speakers including Charles Chao (CEO of SINA), John Liu (Google China) and in Auditorium 2 with G-Startup Competition. We will be live-blogging (and live-tweeting) G-Startup Competition here. And reporting in more details on keynotes and various interviews afterwards. Stay tuned and follow us on @technodechina #TheGMIC #gstartup ! Related posts: G-Startup Competition Prizes Announced, So Apply Now! Mobile Blog Blogging anywhere and anytime Global Mobile Game Awards at GMIC2011 Submit Your Mobile Game!
Keep reading

Chinese Pinterest Huaban.com Grabs Money and Attention

Image
Out of all the Chinese Pinterests we mentioned earlier , Huaban (, or petals) is decidedly the one that stands out from the crowd to receive US$ more than one million in Series A round of funding from KPCB, less than ten days after the website went online. The Hangzhou-based service was crafted by the startup behind Yupoo , one of the earliest and best Flickr-clone in China founded about 7 years ago. With exact the same idea, features and even web design and layout, Huaban let users collect (just like Pin with Pinterest) pictures by uploading local files or grabbing one from existing webpage. You can recollect (like Repin) whatever attractive to you and save them onto your Huaban (like board) and Like pictures collected by other users. Moreover, you can create boards under different categories to organize all the pictures you collected. Pinterest per se has seen huge growth with rapid rising traffic in the States, the site has 3.2 million UV monthly with growth rate over 100%, topped
Keep reading