For those who didn’t get a chance to see those chats with Google’s Jason Spero and AOL’s David Temkin, both are now available for your Web-viewing pleasure, so I thought I would do a post pointing you in their direction. (Hey, we’re nothing if not full-service here at AllThingsD.)

If you are really, really lazy, here are the highlights:

In addition to bemoaning missing the Women’s World Cup soccer semifinals, Spero and I naturally talked about the opportunities and challenges on the ad side of the mobile business. On the plus side, Spero said that mobile ad rates have held relatively steady even with a huge increase in volume, something he called a fairly significant accomplishment. The quality of those ads, he acknowledged, remains a top issue for Google.

“If you look backwards, we have made enormous strides in quality,” Spero said. “But it continues to be the absolute No. 1 investment area … Frankly, if we don’t do it, we are going to decrease click-through rates.”

We also chatted about how his view on Apple versus Android has changed since joining Google, as well as the privacy challenges relating to location-based services.

As for Temkin, I began by asking him whether in fact AOL has a mobile strategy (doing my best to channel my inner Kara Swisher). He then quipped that it had something to do with mailing out smartphones with DVDs giving 10 hours of free usage, before getting into the company’s real strategy in mobile.

AOL, Temkin said, has passed Microsoft to become the No. 4 mobile destination on the Web, behind only Google, Facebook and Yahoo. “We’re doing pretty well on mobile,” he said, noting that it is not just about AOL.com but also its subbrands, such as Engadget, Moviefone and Stylelist.

He also talked about some of the company’s new “mobile-first” initiatives, including a music application called Play by AOL and a forthcoming online magazine, Editions by AOL. Plus, I got a chance to abuse him by playing the old AOL dial-up tone a couple times. The video is worth watching for that bit of nostalgia alone.

Jason Spero interview:

David Temkin interview (split into two parts):

Part 2:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110729/talking-mobile-with-googles-jason-spero-and-aols-david-temkin/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110713/paypal-enables-peer-to-peer-payments-on-android-with-nfc/ http://allthingsd.com/20110713/paypal-enables-peer-to-peer-payments-on-android-with-nfc/#comments Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:46:40 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=97629 PayPal has doubled its mobile payments projections to $3 billion this year, and is investing heavily in new ways to make it easy to pay with the phone.

Last week, that meant buying Zong, a carrier billing provider. Today, Laura Chambers, the senior director of PayPal Mobile, demonstrated another way at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference in San Francisco.

The new application, which will be available later this summer, will allow users to transfer money using near field communication on the Nexus S, the first Google Android device to have NFC chips integrated. For now, the solution will only work on NFC-enabled phones — a very limited market.

In the demo between Chambers and VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall, Marshall fictitiously sent $1 million to Chambers by entering the amount into a widget on the homescreen. To activate the transfer, he tapped his NFC-enabled phone against Chambers’ phone.

The video below shows the technology in action:

That’s because Rich Miner’s day job these days is heading the East Coast wing of Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Internet giant. And as a money guy, Miner said that, until very recently, the money was still in making apps for the iPhone.

“There were just that many more handsets out there,” Miner said, speaking on stage at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. “That has clearly flipped.”

Miner said that Android, which was little more than some demos and PowerPoint slides when Google acquired it, is now a major player and, in many ways, a better option for start-ups. In part, he said, that’s because it is easier for users to develop and test applications because it supports side-loading of programs so that companies can test out and refine their ideas before launching them.

Miner has plenty of money to put where his mouth is. His Google-backed fund has $100 million to invest each year, Miner said, with investments so far in areas as diverse as automotive to clean tech to Internet companies. At the event, Miner announced that Google Ventures has invested in two mobile companies, Crittercism and Astrid.

Miner said that the goal of Google Ventures is to make money, not to push Google’s various platforms and strategies. That said, Miner said his tie to Google is a big advantage, giving him a Google badge, a deep rolodex and “Google Goggles.”

“We can see the world through Google’s eyes,” Miner said.

Of course, things weren’t always that way for Miner.

He noted that Android wasn’t originally looking to sell itself to Google. The small self-funded start-up was just going around raising money, pitching companies on the value and importance of having an open smartphone operating system. Miner said that Larry Page immediately latched on to the idea, while then-CEO Eric Schmidt and Sergei Brin were less focused on mobile at that point.

Since then, Miner said, Brin and Schmidt have become experts in wireless.

“All three came to be champions,” he said.

I have posted below a video interview with ContentNext’s founder Rafat Ali, who spoke about the deal. I caught up with him in his New York hotel this morning (by coincidence I flew into New York today on a redeye).

But the deal–which comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million–begs the question of which tech blog might be next to be acquired.

And, after much noisy poking around today, BoomTown is giving the nod to one of the sector’s larger and splashier sites: TechCrunch.

Several sources told me TechCrunch has been in off-and-on talks recently with Time Warner’s AOL (TWX), which wants to pay from $20 and $30 million for the site.

I could not find out what price TechCrunch thinks is fair, although one might assume it is higher than that.

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde told me via email that she had no comment. “My policy is not to comment on rumors of our business,” she wrote.

TechCrunch, which was founded in mid-2005 by Michael Arrington, is a group-edited blog that has grown large by focusing–”obsessively,” according to the site’s About page–on Web 2.0 start-ups, covering every jog and tittle of their life cycles.

Sources said the talks between TechCrunch and AOL have been ongoing for the past six to eight weeks, although the site has been in talks with several other large media companies interested in it in the past and these have not led to an acquisition.

AOL would probably be a good home for a site like TechCrunch, since it has a blog focus from its own Switched site and sites it bought, like Engadget.

AOL acquired that popular gadget site in 2005 in the $25 million acquisition of Weblogs, which was founded by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis.

Calacanis, by the way, runs an annual tech conference with TechCrunch, now called TechCrunch50.

Also, I have stayed in Calacanis’s house in the Brentwood (see post and video here), when I was interviewing a Disney exec onstage at a paidContent conference in Los Angeles recently.

Oh, yes, it’s a small tech blogging world after all.

But the money has suddenly become big for the sites involved in that universe too, although most still have relatively small businesses.

Nonetheless, tech bloggers have grown in number and influence, as sites–like this one–compete to break news and attract readers.

Such efforts take funding–despite the lower costs as compared with traditional media–and this probably means inevitable consolidation.

Before its acquisition by Guardian, for example, ContentNext had been raising several million dollars recently to fuel more expansion.

Other sites have also recently raised funds, such as GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider and VentureBeat.

Most of them have also been talking about various roll-ups between and among one other. Sources told me that VentureBeat, for example, has spoken separately in the past to both paidContent and TechCrunch about joining forces.

VentureBeat’s Founder Matt Marshall would not comment on that, but did note that “size matters, so you have to do what you can to get the economics of scale.”

That includes adding on more sites and doing conferences, as VentureBeat has done (its new conference is called MobileBeat, for example, which will take place in Sunnyvale, Calif. on July 24.)

“Consolidation is what you are probably going to see,” predicted Marshall about the tech blogging arena.

Here’s ContentNext’s Ali talking about exactly that and more today: