June 12, 2006

Google’s Gbuy Nearing Launch – No Transaction Fee During Initial Phase

Written by: Juanchito

I was reading an article today that Google is ready to launch it’s new Gbuy to compete with eBay and Paypal. This should be a really interesting battle and competition is always good for us the consumer. It should lower costs. I hope Google Gbuy does really well because I have a plan to create a website that would collect a lot of small sums of money. They transaction costs are killer when using a credit card.

Here’s an excerpt of the full article on the launch:

Google’s online payment system, Gbuy, is expected to launch June 28, further pitting the Internet giant against industry titan and rival eBay, according to a research note released Friday by a Wall Street analyst.

Gbuy is expected to be free during the initial phase, but merchants may eventually be charged a 1.5 percent to 2 percent per-transaction fee, Jordan Rohan, an RBC Capital Markets analyst, said in his research note. A fee of that size would be slightly less than that charged by eBay’s online payment system, PayPal.

Google was not immediately available to comment.

“The brilliance of Google’s Gbuy merchant-to-consumer payment platform lies in what Google may do with the transactional data it captures from the thousands of merchants that may ultimately offer Gbuy,” Rohan said.

Now if I can only find a way to get into the beta test group of Google’s Gbuy I’ll be set.

Update: Here’s a good set of screenshots of the process of paying through Google’s Gbuy.

US World Cup Soccer (football) Game Streamed Live in English – Probably Illegal

Written by: Juanchito

Take this for what it is. I was browsing the internet to see what kind of coverage I could find on the World Cup. I ran across a website that says how to get WorldCup coverage in English. Luckily it doesn’t matter so much because it is being done on ESPN2 which is standard for cable these days. It is amazing that the technology is there to stream TV online. The next year or 2 is going to be amazing as the tv streaming gets even better and better. It will soon replace TV with internet TV like the IP phone is doing with regular phones.