Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, believes that a third of check-out terminals in retail stores and restaurants will be upgraded to allow wireless “tap and pay” from mobile phones within the next year.
Such a development will prepare the ground for what he believes will be a “trillion dollar” industry of mobile advertising and payments.
The Californian internet company announced a new “Google Wallet” for its Android mobile-phone software last month, alongside partners including Sprint Nextel, the mobile operator, and MasterCard, the payments firm.
Speaking at the Cannes Lions advertising festival on Wednesday, Mr Schmidt said Google was working to encourage payment processors to upgrade a third of their terminals, which will be sufficient for wide adoption of the technology.
“That money is going to be spent not by Google and not by the phone guys but by the credit card companies, because the fraud rates are so much lower,” he said. “Nobody knows how quickly this will occur but it’s in their interests to convert as fast as they humanly can.”
Because of the number of different players involved in deploying such a system, Mr Schmidt said it was impossible to make a firm forecast of the timescale.
“I judge that based on how long I think it takes, because the terminals are available now, the software is available now or this summer,” he said. “How long does it take an infrastructure player to upgrade a significant percentage of their infrastructure – it’s on the order of a year, it’s not a week, it’s not a month but it’s also not five years… It’s an educated guess.”
He added that “most [mobile-phone] vendors” have announced they will include the necessary “near-field communication” chip in their devices in the next year, referring to LG, Sony Ericsson and Apple’s rumoured new iPhone. Google will make its wallet available for the iPhone if NFC is included in a future version of the device, he said.
As Google and other companies focus their attention on handheld devices, Mr Schmidt said that “all the really clever stuff” would happen in mobile technology, particularly in emerging markets where fixed-line broadband was scarce.
Google is also looking to harness social networking information and personalisation technology to help users manage the huge quantity of information which is posted online everyday.
“If we have the equivalent of a social graph, we can help select videos that you’d want to watch,” Mr Schmidt said. “We can suggest literally infinite television.”
Gmail’s “priority inbox” feature was an existing example of how computer algorithms can help to intelligently filter an overwhelming amount of information, he said.
Artificial intelligence at the server can take such data and “begin to understand things that we care about”, he said.
“The best thing would be if Google knew what you wanted without you having to type it in. With your permission, with a mobile phone we can trigger search queries about where you are.”
But he added that in spite of these and other Google initiatives, such as its self-driving car: “It’s going to be a long time before computers have volition and hope and all the things that make humans special.”
