beautiful bytes – Say Heello to Googorola and Kuapay

Google+ integrated into Google search.

In a move that was frankly as predictable as the end of a Hollywood RomCom, Google has started integrating Google+ into it’s search results. Users who are logged into their Google+ account, will now start to see comments from the connections appearing in the search results for relevant queries. We’ve been talking since the dawn of bytes about how desperate Google is to crack the social media market and this news isn’t a huge shock but it is something important to consider for the future.

There’s no hiding from social media anymore. There’s never been more of a need for an honest, interesting and relevant presence online. Social sharing is going to affect not only your SEO and search rankings now, but people will also be able to see comments and updates on your Google search result once Google+ release brand pages in the next couple of months. For many it will be the first point of contact with your charity so they should be recent and appealing.

Kuapay leading the mobile payment revolution

Mobile payment systems are becoming less of a sci-fi ‘what if’ and are quickly developing into a feasible method of payment and are set to be accepted by more than 80% of point-of-sale systems in 2016.

Visa recently announced that it is gearing up its migration to contactless chip technology, as mentioned in last weeks beautiful bytes, getting businesses ready for NFC-based mobile payments. This week we read about a start up that has sneaked in superceeded the revolution, allowing customers to use a specially generated QR code at the point of payment.

Kuapay founder Joaquin Ayuso commented “The virtualization of the wallet is a path the market wants to take. We are in place to expose that market to users faster.”

Kuapay has iPhone, BlackBerry and Android applications for consumers. Users add their credit card information to the app and when they want to pay for something the app generates a QR code for the merchants to scan as if they would scan a barcode.

It is not only accessible for consumers, but also for merchants as it doesn’t require them to purchase additional hardware.

The obvious impact for the sector is in charity shops but an easy payment system could be beneficial across many types of fundraising such as events or face to face. It’s important to keep on top of any kind of payment trends that could help make giving as straightforward as possible.

Everyone is talking about …

Google’s acquisition of Motorola this week. The news took the tech world by storm this Monday and posts about how, why and whether or not it’s a good idea are prolific in the digital blogging community.

In short, Google bought Motorola for £7.7bn (cash) on Monday. For Google, the assumed gain is two fold; the first is that they will acquire some hardware developers in a bid to compete with Apple’s iPhone and the second is that they will receive a wealth of patents with which they can use as defense against legal action by its industry rivals (though many people are dubious about whether Google will ever be able to compete with Apple in the hardware stakes). They’ve also taken on 19,000 staff in this acquisition (which is a lot of mouths to feed considering Google is famous for supplying free meals to employees).

There is a lot of speculation as to what this might mean going forward, smarter smart phones, even more social searching?  It is definitely an acquisition to keep your eye on considering how much of an impact the smart phone boom has had on the sector. New products and services along with stauncher competition are on the horizon.

Facebook launches ad targeting by postcode

For smaller charities, this could be a great introduction to using Facebook ads in a relatively low risk way. Especially for those that target communities, have specific areas of interest or charities that frequently use events fundraising.

And finally…

Say heello to the new Twitter.

Last week we noted that Twitter is allowing users to add images to their tweets from the official page, which rendered sites like Twitpic futile. Instead of thinking of another way to develop Twitpic and make it relevant to its core audience of social media and photography lovers, the team at Twitpic decided to go down a slightly more interesting route with their response.

Founder of Twitpic, Noah Everette, has created what can only be described as a Twitter clone. On heello you can tweet ping 140 character messages, follow listen to friends and celebrities and retweet echo pings that you thought were relevant.

I’m sure it’s too much of an effort to be a joke but I cannot fathom what other reason there could be for creating heello – unless it’s waiting for Twitter to annoy people into converting with their more rampant advertising structure, but that doesn’t seem feasible in the short term.

Still, people seem to be having plenty of fun on there because it’s slightly less moderated than Twitter. It might be fun to create a profile on there whilst there is still some buzz around it – if only to protect your brand from hoaxers!

The site is getting around 100,000 new users every day. I wonder how many of those tried to sign up for a Flutter account too?

Very odd.

Lucy J