A new patent application has appeared on the uspto.gov site that includes images with a mocked up GPay (google pay) application for a mobile device. Note that this is not yet a granted patent, it is just a patent application, so it’s up the to patent office examiners to say yay or nay to this patent.

In general, I put this this patent application in the “pretty obvious” bucket. While not as blatantly obvious as some patents, it is far from ground breaking thinking.

At a high level, the patent covers a process for making a transaction that goes something like this…

• consumer wants to make a transaction, like buy something from a vending machine
• consumer sends a special text message to a payment gateway of some sort
• text message includes info about the user (credentials) and the item (quantity, id)
• payment gateway “does the right thing”
  • validates the consumer credentials
  • debits the consumer account
  • credits the merchant account
  • releases the merchandise

Of course, it takes 27 pages to say all this (and 10 diagrams).

There have been a slew of mobile payment patent activity lately, including these 5 granted patents for Diebold relating to mobile access to ATM machines.

What’s driving all this activity? I think the innovators and boundary pushers out there all think it kind of quaint that we walk around with basically powerful computers in our pockets, yet when it comes time to make a purchase, we pull out this little plastic card with a black stripe on it. It’s really not a matter of if payments from mobile/handheld devices will happen, it’s a matter of when. And for the vendors and institutions involved, it’s a matter of who wins. It’s basically a green field right now (at least in the US). And someone like Google certainly has the ability to change how things work in a big way.

I think Google’s biggest stumbling block in this area won’t be technology oriented, but more about privacy and trust. Let’s face, Google knows an awful lot of stuff these days, and so far they have been good caretakers, but there are people that are worried.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 4:49 pm and is filed under mobile, google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.