Our three topics this week are Google’s Alphabet restructuring, privacy policies and concerns for major smartphone vendors, and trends in mobile payments. We kick off with a discussion of Google’s announcement that it will create a new parent company called Alphabet under which the core Google business and Google’s various new initiatives will be subsidiaries. We discuss the pros and cons of this approach and what it means for Google going forward. Our Question of the Week is about the different levels of privacy protection offered by the major smartphone platforms and the implications that has for their ability to provide effective cloud services. Our third topic is mobile payments, prompted by recent announcements about payment platform CurrentC, which seems to be struggling, Samsung’s announcement today of Samsung Pay’s impending launch, and the ongoing rollout of Apple Pay. And in our Weekly Pick, Aaron recommends some running shoes. As usual, the embedded SoundCloud player and links to other sources and related content can be found below.
We invite listeners to submit questions for subsequent weeks in the comments below, on Twitter (@jandawson, @aaronmiller), or via email (jan at jackdawresearch dot com).
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Show notes:
Here are some useful links relating to this week’s episode:
- Jan’s blog post on making sense of Google’s Alphabet move
- Jan’s earlier blog post on Apple and privacy
- A report on the CurrentC news
- iMore’s blog post about Apple Pay
- Joe Casabona’s post about switching to the iPhone
- The website for Altra Running shoes, which Aaron recommended as his pick of the week, which are also on Amazon (affiliate link).
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