PayPal starts deeper integration with Google; users can now pay directly in Gmail, YouTube and more

Google earlier this year rebranded all of its payment services under Google Pay to help it double down on making transactions across its platform more frictionless (and more used). Now comes another development: PayPal and Google are kicking off a deep integration, where users who add their PayPal details to their Google Play accounts will be able to pay bills and for other items, using PayPal, without logging in and without leaving the Google services.

The integration, when it goes live later this year, will cover apps like Gmail, YouTube, Google Store and any services using Google Pay — and it will include not just payments but also peer-to-peer transfers.

This is not the first time that Google and PayPal have worked together — the latter has been a payment option in Google Play since 2014, in-store, and in online transactions that were managed by Google and a Google Pay option since last year. And similarly, Google itself has a number of other partners from the payments world, including Braintree, Sripe, Cybersource, Vantiv, Visa and Mastercard.

This new phase of the relationship is interesting for how it benefits both sides. For Google, it will mean that users are less likely to leave Google sites to complete a transaction, potentially never to return; and will give users one more option for how to pay for things, making Google’s own sales more likely to be completed rather than abandoned. For PayPal, it will give users one more easy option for using its rails when buying things, and that will translate into more transaction revenues for PayPal.

We’re in an interesting phase in the world of payments at the moment. The challenge is no longer getting people used to the idea of paying online: a substantial proportion of consumers in developed markets are willing and able to pay for items on digital platforms. The problem is one of trying to capture and keep users’ attention: there are potentially now too many payment options, and too many places for us to visit too easily. The struggle for app publishers, platform owners, and others now is to keep people engaged in your product, rather than migrating elsewhere, which could lead to people abandoning their purchases and also leaving your service for another one.

This is part of the reason why Amazon is so effective: it provides a very seamless and quick way for people to browse and buy things, even more so if you are a Prime subscriber.

In payments, this is translating into a new wave of services where transactions are being enabled at the point at which you need them, with minimal friction: no log-ins, no jumping to new sites or apps, no additional steps. Google and PayPal are not the only ones who are now knitting all of this together more tightly.

Just earlier this month, Microsoft integrated its own answer to Google Pay, Microsoft Pay, into Outlook precisely for this reason, with Stripe as one of the first active integration partners. And PayPal itself is buying mobile payments company iZettle to close the loop better on point of sale payments in markets like Europe.

I asked Bill Ready, the EVP and COO of PayPal (and previously the co-founder and head of Braintree), why it’s taken this long to get this integration in place on Google. I didn’t get a direct answer, but a hint that although tighter integration is the goal, it’s not always that easy to stitch together services from different silos:

“We are always looking for ways to improve the experience and to make payments even more seamless and secure for our customers wherever they want to pay,” he said. “After the successful launch with Android Pay last year, which built on our existing integration with Google Play, our teams came together to enable this new experience, which will allow customers in the U.S. who add PayPal to any one of Google’s services to be able to pay across the Google ecosystem, anywhere that PayPal is offered as a payment method, with only minimal setup.”

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Google opens its G Suite for Education to home-school co-ops

Google today announced that it is changing the eligibility guidelines of its free G Suite for Education service to include home-school co-ops. Parents and teachers who run home-school co-ops will be able to sign up for it in the coming weeks.

G Suite for Educations includes all of Google’s usual online productivity tools and then layers a number of education-specific services like Classroom on top of that. Google Classroom, it’s worth noting, was already available to any G Suite user, but to subscribe to G Suite for Education, you needed to be affiliated with a school or school district. Now, home-school co-ops will be able to verify their status and get access to G Suite for Education, too.

“Through technology, home-school co-op teachers can set and change assignments on the fly, students can work together even if geographically separated, and everyone has a common format for collaboration,” writes Darren Jones of the Home School Legal Defense Association, in today’s announcement. “It’s because of this potential that I’ve been working closely with Google this year to make sure that home-school co-ops have the same access as other schools to G Suite for Education.”

Google has piloted this program with a number of co-ops in recent months and given that these groups function a bit like traditional schools, with some being more formal than others, I can see how access to a shared and integrated set of tools would be useful there.

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Dog-sitting startup Rover just raised $155M

Rover, a dog-walking and dog-boarding service that merged with DogVacay around this time last year, is now the second of such startups this year to raise a massive new round of funding with its announcement of a $155 million financing round.

While competitor Wag has become a juggernaut, there seems room for both room for a second player and the potential to outmaneuver Wag even with its massive influx of capital. Both DogVacay and Rover had a very similar model and eventually merged in an all-stock deal, creating a more substantial competitor for Wag. The round consisted of $125 million in equity financing led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, with a $30 million credit facility with Silicon Valley Bank. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the round values Rover at $970 million.

Wag earlier this year picked up $300 million in a massive funding round led by SoftBank. That was, of course, SoftBank — which is investing massive piles of capital into startups and pretty much altering the calculus of venture capital in the process. But it also signaled a huge interest in various dog-care services, including apparently Rover, as a potential business opportunity for the millions of dog owners in the world. If you’ll walk anywhere in San Francisco, you’re destined to run into a very large number of very good dogs, and it makes enough sense that there should be an opportunity to capitalize on dog-ownership as a whole.

Rover connects dog owners with various users that will walk, board, or generally take care of dogs — a critical service for anyone who might be traveling, or just work in a non-dog friendly office. Users just book a dog walker or sitter through the app, which connects them with area sitters. It’s an area where Wag has faced a lot of criticism following a major Bloomberg report regarding poor service (and losing dogs). There are, of course, many challenges for any service that offloads some kind of daily need to a third party starting in a similar fashion to Uber.

Rover, interestingly, notes on its website that it “accepts less than 20% of potential sitters,” perhaps a dig at the criticism for Wag or the space in general and as an attempt to soothe concerns from potential users. Rover says it has more than 200,000 sitters throughout North America. The company previously raised $156 million, and previous investors include A-Grade Investments, Foundry Group, Madrona Venture Group, Menlo Ventures, OMERS Ventures, Petco, and StepStone Group.

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So long, StumbleUpon

All told, 16 years is a pretty good run in the social media world. After launching in 2002, website discovery platform StumbleUpon is shutting down on June 30. Over its existence, the service racked up 60 billion stumbles for 40 million users, cofounder Garrett Camp wrote in a Medium post this week.

Those of us who wrote for sites at the height of the tool’s power know it was capable of driving a tremendous amount of traffic in its prime. One of StumbleUpon’s greatest strengths was its simplicity, offering up content with a single click. But Camp notes in his post that its simplicity was ultimately its detriment in the ever-changing online world.

eBay bought the service for a reported $75 million in 2007, but failed it relevant. In 2013, the service underwent significant layoffs, allowing Camp to buy a majority share two years later.

“Since starting SU the number of people with internet access has grown nearly 10x, and mobile phones and social media have changed our lives. The number of platforms to share or host content has increased significantly, yet we still need better tools to help us filter through the exploding amount of content on the web, and find signal within the noise. And we’ve learned from SU that while simplicity and serendipity is important, so is enabling contextual curation.”

Those lessons, it seems, will be informing Camp’s product, Mix.com — as will StumbleUpon’s use base. Existing StumbleUpon accounts will be transitioned to Mix ahead of the June 30 deadline.

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Trek’s Commuter+ 7 is a beautiful – if pricey – electric bike

At $3,700, Trek’s Commuter+ 7 is a hard sell in a world of commodity e-bikes. But, thankfully, Trek has added superior components, great styling, and surprising durability to the package, making this pedal-assist ebike one of the best I’ve ridden.

The bike has a matte black finish, fenders, and a motor guard to keep your ebike safe from passing rocks and trash. The 250-watt Bosch Performance CX runs at a maximum of 20 miles per hour and the removable battery lets you swap out packs if things run low.

I enjoyed the ride on this thing and, although it could be prohibitively expensive, you do get some solid components on a well-tested brand. Give it a ride like I did and see for yourself.

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Klevio launches its smart intercom and app that lets you open doors remotely

Klevio, a smart home startup out of the U.K., is officially launching its first product: a smart intercom system that lets you control your front door lock via an iOS and Android app on your phone and remotely.

Dubbed “Klevio One,” the device is designed to be retrofitted to existing electric strike-enabled locks, and also interfaces with intercom systems found on the communal doors of apartment blocks. This, say its makers, means that it is better suited to flats than smart locks already on the market.

In a call with Klevio co-founder and CEO Aleš Špetič, he explained that the approach the London-based company has taken is different to smart locks that typically use a motor to turn the lock and require tearing out and replacing your existing lock. In contrast, if you already have an electric strike as part of your lock — which a lot of apartments do — the Klevio One can simply be wired to interface with it. If you don’t, a Klevio installer can fit one to your existing lock for you.

This major upside of this approach is that Klevio isn’t re-inventing the whole wheel, but taking years old, tried and tested electric strike technology, and simply adding smart connectivity to it.

It means the Klevio One works with multiple doors and there’s no need to modify the communal area of apartment buildings when installing it, since the device is located within an individual apartment. You can also still use your old physical keys as a backup, and the company says the use of Klevio won’t be obvious to anyone outside the building.

And as you’d expect, the Klevio system is cloud-connected so that you can control your lock remotely, and issue virtual and one-time use keys. It comes in a WiFi only version, and a subscription version with added 4G.

The startup’s back story is noteworthy, too. The Klevio’s original concept and eureka moment came at Onefinestay, the ‘upscale Airbnb’ acquired by Accor in 2016. After the exit, Onefinestay co-founder Demetrios Zoppos teamed up with CubeSensors’ Aleš Špetič and Marko Mrdjenovič to start the new company, including purchasing the needed patents from Onefinestay.

In addition, Onefinestay co-founder Greg Marsh is an investor in Klevio, alongside LocalGlobe’s partner Robin Klein (who I’m told has invested in a personal capacity). To date Klevio has raised £1.2 million in funding.

Meanwhile, Špetič tells me that prior to today’s wider launch — where it can be ordered via the Klevio website — the Klevio One has been piloted with 1,000 users across London.

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Instapaper on pause in Europe to fix GDPR compliance “issue”

Remember Instapaper? The Pinterest-owned, read-it-later bookmarking service is taking a break in Europe — apparently while it works on achieving compliance with the region’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, which will start being applied from tomorrow.

Instapaper’s notification does not say how long the self-imposed outage will last.

WTF is instapaper doing with data? pic.twitter.com/eG2dhtkvnd

— Sam (@smithsam) May 23, 2018

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation updates the bloc’s privacy framework, most notably by bringing in supersized fines for data violations, which in the most serious cases can scale up to 4% of a company’s global annual turnover.

So it significantly ramps up the risk of, for example, having sloppy security, or consent flows that aren’t clear and specific enough (if indeed consent is the legal basis you’re relying on for processing people’s personal information).

That said, EU regulators are clearly going to tread softly on the enforcement front in the short term. And any major fines are only going to hit the most serious violations and violators — and only down the line when data protection authorities have received complaints and conducted thorough investigations.

So it’s not clear exactly why Instapaper believes it needs to pause its service to European users. It’s also had plenty of time to prepare to be compliant — given the new framework was agreed at the back end of 2015. We’ve reached out to Pinterest with questions and will update this story with any response.

In an exchange on Twitter, Pinterest product engineering manager Brian Donohue — who, prior to acquisition was Instapaper’s CEO — flagged that the product’s privacy policy “hasn’t been changed in several years”. But he declined to specify exactly what it feels its compliance issue is — saying only: “We’re actively working to resolve the issue.”

In a customer support email that we reviewed, the company also told one European user: “We’ve been advised to undergo an assessment of the Instapaper service to determine what, if any, changes may be appropriate but to restrict access to IP addresses in the EU as the best course of action.”

“We’re really sorry for any inconvenience, and we are actively working on bringing the service back online for residents in Europe,” it added.

The product’s privacy policy is one of the clearer T&Cs we’ve seen. It also states that users can already access “all your personally identifiable information that we collect online and maintain”, as well as saying people can “correct factual errors in your personally identifiable information by changing or deleting the erroneous information” — which, assuming those statements are true, looks pretty good for complying with portions of GDPR that are intended to give consumers more control over their personal data.

Instapaper also already lets users delete their accounts. And if they do that it specifies that “all account information and saved page data is deleted from the Instapaper service immediately” (though it also cautions that “deleted data may persist in backups and logs until they are deleted”).

In terms of what Instapaper does with users’ data, its privacy policy claims it does not share the information “with outside parties except to the extent necessary to accomplish Instapaper’s functionality”.

But it’s also not explicitly clear from the policy whether or not it’s passing information to its parent company Pinterest, for example, so perhaps it feels it needs to add more detail there.

Another possibility is Instapaper is working on compliance with GDPR’s data portability requirement. Though the service has offered exports options for years. But perhaps it feels these need to be more comprehensive.

As is inevitable ahead of a major regulatory change there’s a good deal of confusion about what exactly must be done to comply with the new rules. And that’s perhaps the best explanation for what’s going on with Instapaper’s pause.

Though, again, there’s plenty of official and detailed guidance from data protection agencies to help.

Unfortunately it’s also true that there’s a lot of unofficial and dubious quality advice from a cottage industry of self-styled ‘GDPR consultants’ that have sprung up with the intention of profiting off of the uncertainty. So — as ever — do your due diligence when it comes to the ‘experts’ you choose.

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It’s unconstitutional for Trump to block people on Twitter

A uniquely 21st-century constitutional question received a satisfying answer today from a federal judge: President Trump cannot block people on Twitter, as it constitutes a violation of their First Amendment rights. The court also ruled he must unblock all previously blocked users. “No government official is above the law,” the judge concluded.

The question was brought as part of a suit brought by the Knight First Amendment Institute, which alleged that the official Presidential Twitter feed amounts to a public forum, and that the government barring individuals from participating in it amounted to limiting their right to free speech.

After consideration, New York Southern District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald determined that this is indeed that case:

We hold that portions of the @realDonaldTrump account — the “interactive space” where Twitter users may directly engage with the content of the President’s tweets — are properly analyzed under the “public forum” doctrines set forth by the Supreme Court, that such space is a designated public forum, and that the blocking of the plaintiffs based on their political speech constitutes viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment.

The President’s side argued that Trump has his own rights, and that in this case the choice not to engage with certain people on Twitter is among them. These are both true, Judge Buchwald found, but that doesn’t mean blocking is okay.

A group of Twitter users is suing Trump for blocking them

There is nothing wrong with a government official exercising their First Amendment rights by ignoring someone. And indeed that is what the “mute” function on Twitter is equivalent to. No harm is done to either party by the President choosing not to respond, and so he is free to do so.

But to block someone both prevents that person from seeing tweets and from responding to them, preventing them from even accessing a public forum. As the decision puts it:

We reject the defendants’ contentions that the First Amendment does not apply in this case and that the President’s personal First Amendment interests supersede those of plaintiffs…

While we must recognize, and are sensitive to, the President’s personal First Amendment rights, he cannot exercise those rights in a way that infringes the corresponding First Amendment rights of those who have criticized him.

The court also examined the evidence and found that despite the Executive’s arguments that his Twitter accounts are, for various reasons, in part private and not subject to rules limiting government spaces, the President’s Twitter is definitively a public forum, meeting the criteria set out some time back by the Supreme Court.

At this point in time President Trump has by definition performed unconstitutional acts, but the court was not convinced that any serious legal remedy needs to be applied. And not because the Executive side of the case said it was monstrous of the Judicial to dare to tell it what to do:

While we find entirely unpersuasive the Government’s parade of horribles regarding the judicial interference in executive affairs presented by an injunction directing the President to comply with constitutional restrictions… declaratory relief is likely to achieve the same purpose.

By this the judge means that while the court would be legally in the clear if it issued an official order binding the Executive, but that there’s no reason to do so. Instead, merely declaring that the President is has violated the rules of the Constitution should be more than enough to compel his team to take the appropriate action.

Specifically, Trump and (it is implied but not stated specifically) all public officials are to unblock any blocked users on Twitter and never hit that block button again:

No government official is above the law and because all government officials are presumed to follow the law once the judiciary has said what the law is, we must assume that the President and Scavino will remedy the blocking we have held to be unconstitutional.

No timeline is set but it’s clear that the Executive is on warning. You can read the full decision here.

This also sets an interesting precedent as regarding other social networks, but the repercussions thereof are impossible to predict at this time. Legal scholars and political agents will almost certainly weigh in on the issue heavily over the coming weeks.

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