Microsoft released its latest ‘future-gazing’ video, offering an exciting glimpse into how it believes technology will develop and integrate within our personal and professional lives. Read more…

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PayPal has been a powerhouse in online payments but it hasn’t really cracked the much bigger market for payments for goods in the real world. Now, the company is starting to show off how it can put all of its components and recent acquisitions together to form a broad tool for mobile payments.

PayPal hosted a partner event for retailers yesterday and began explaining how they’ll be able to implement its tools for in-store payments. The big reveal will happen next month at PayPal’s developer conference in San Francisco, but the company showed a glimpse of how it’s marshaling its resources. It’s important for PayPal to step up with a compelling offering because the mobile payments market is getting crowded with options like Square, Google Wallet and upcoming services like Isis from the cellular carriers and digital wallets from credit card companies.

Scott Thompson, president of PayPal, said in a blog post the company is looking to be a one-stop shop for merchants to help them address every part of the shopping lifecycle. OK, that’s a bit of jargon, but it means PayPal is going to help push out targeted advertising, help with in-store discovery and improve transactions with a handful of options.

In a video provided by PayPal, it shows how users will be able to walk into a store and check in to a location to unlock discounts and coupons. When a consumer goes to check out, he’ll be able to pay by entering his phone number. That leverages eBay’s purchase of Zong and its carrier billing capabilities, though it’s not clear how much easier or more convenient that is for consumers who pay with a credit card swipe. But it does open up the option to use carrier billing for physical goods in-store, which is good for people without a card, though the question of how large the transactions fees will be is important. Right now, carrier billing fees are still much higher than credit card fees, which might deter some merchants.

Users will also be able to scan items in-store and pay for them with PayPal without having to get in line. Customers can just flash their phone to an employee who will confirm the purchase. This is very much like AisleBuyer and it sounds like PayPal is looking to bring this to restaurant bills as well, something Thompson hinted at in his blog post. This is a cool step that makes sense for people who want to get in and out quickly.

Customers will be able to apparently pay ahead for coffee ahead of time and pick it up. Users will also be able to choose how they pay for something after the purchase with PayPal Credit, which seems to leverage eBay’s BillMeLater. All of this appears to work through PayPal’s mobile application and doesn’t seem to require any new investments by merchants. That’s a big concern for mobile payments built on near field communication, which requires many businesses to upgrade their point-of-sale terminals to handle contactless payments.

The new mobile payment tools don’t appear to include NFC payments. PayPal recently introduced person-to-person payments using NFC on Android devices, but the company told me at the time it was just focusing NFC on P2P payments. It sounds like PayPal is trying to work around the hardware constraints of NFC payments at point of sale.

Other shopping features on display included the ability to get push notifications for discounts that can be shared, which appears to build off eBay’s acquisition of WHERE. Consumers will also be able to scan an item in store and find inventory at other locations, something eBay got from its RedLaser and Milo pick-ups.

It’s unclear how soon all of this will come together and how many merchants will sign on. But providing a complete service for retailers and businesses to not only push out offers and discounts but also complete the transactions makes sense. Merchants can close the loop on transactions and understand how their marketing is doing. This is essentially what Google is trying to do with Google Wallet and Offers though it’s focusing primarily on facilitating targeted marketing, rather than taking a cut of transactions.

PayPal’s payment initiative is part of eBay’s broader commerce platform called X.commerce, which it’s building off the acquisition of Magento.

But there’s also a lot of questions to be answered. For instance, will consumers find this more convenient than a card swipe? Will PayPal make it any easier for people to set-up and manage accounts? Do all of these parts work well together in one solution? And how aggressive will PayPal be in selling this to merchants and consumers? I’ll be interested to hear more and I think PayPal can be a big contender if it gets its execution right. This is going to be a big market but it will require not only great tools but a lot of smart selling to consumers and merchants.

To hear more about mobile payments, check out our GigaOM Mobilize conference Sept. 26 and 27 in San Francisco.

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Intel is getting in the business of buying game engines again as its Havok division has acquired the Vision Game Engine and its owner Trinigy. Read more…

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Gerald Quindlen, outgoing CEO of Logitech

Michael Mace, CEO of Cera Technology and author of the Mobile Musings blogs is one of my favorite stops on the Internet. Every visit to his digital podium is an opportunity to learn. Today I found his breakdown of Logitech’s recent spate of problems that I find is worth sharing. It also ties into my deep philosophy that companies have certain DNA and when they try and go too far from it, they suffer.

Logitech, as you might know recently reported a disastrous quarter and had to get rid of its chief executive Gerald Quindlen and replace him with the Chairman and former CEO Guerrino De Luca.  Mace says Logitech is one of his favorite companies because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

* The Valley says you can’t make money in commodity hardware, but Logitech makes good profits from the most commoditized bits of the computer industry.

* The Valley says you especially can’t make money in low-end consumer hardware, but that’s where Logitech thrives.

* The Valley says that if you want to make money in hardware, you need to be based in a low-cost part of the world like China. But Logitech is Swiss-owned and headquartered in Silicon Valley, two of the highest-cost places to do business in the world.

Amen to that because the 101 is littered with shattered dreams of consumer device startups. There are a few standouts like Sonos, but they have a long journey ahead. Mace points out that reason

Logitech succeeded by picking well-established markets like keyboards and webcams where its skills in design, user experience, and added-value features let it charge a bit more than the commodity players.  As the folks at Logitech will tell you, “we’re chefs, not farmers.”  In other words, we don’t create new markets, we come to existing markets and do an especially nice job of rearranging the ingredients.

But Logitech’s financial performance hasn’t been great for the last two years, and the company’s most recent quarter was a loss. Logitech put much of the blame on its essentially failed Google TV product.  Apparently somebody at Google convinced Logitech to do some farming, and the company is paying dearly for it.

Why?

* the uncertainties of a new market.
* user experience constrained by Google’s software.
* without the ability to fully apply its own strengths.

Mace argues that is wrong to expect Google to help develop a market for you. I agree. Back in the day companies would bank on Microsoft and sign-up for ludicrous products Microsoft would cook up, spend hundreds of millions of dollars and realize that no-one wanted them anyway. I don’t think it is any different this time and consumer electronics companies are childish to think that they can count on Google to make them money. Google is in one business: To be everywhere on connected devices and make money through advertising and data mining of consumer preferences.

For Logitech, the current spate of problems are magnified manifold. Under the previous management, the company took some strategic bets but forgot to focus on their core business  – computing and related accessories. The business of computing is slowly shifting from personal computers to touch driven personalized computers. If Logitech needs to carve a future for itself, the company needs to think differently.

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GigaOM — Tech News, Analysis and Trends

If you are here in Los Angeles, you will be able to see all the sights and sounds of E3 2011 next week. But if you are at home and hoping to see video coverage from the show leap out at you, there’s only one option. Nvidia has announced this…

Neowin.net

It’s already the start of a new work week in Taiwan and also the start of the annual Computex PC hardware trade event. Today graphics chip maker Nvidia took the opportunity to announce the launch of its newest graphics processor, the GeForce GTX 560M. It’s the first product in Nvidia’s…

Neowin.net

One sharp-eyed reader over at WMPowerUser.com noticed something different on a video Ars Technica posted about the new "Bing Search Extras" feature coming in the Windows Phone "Mango" update. The video briefly showed two additional buttons added to the main Bing app interface, as shown in the screenshot on the right (near the bottom).

While the microphone button on the right clearly resembles the voice search capability found in today’s Windows Phones, the other two icons appear to be new. The first icon, which resembles an eye, seems to suggest that Bing Vision may be coming to Windows Phone. If you haven’t heard of Bing Vision, check out the video we posted earlier last year which shows it in action. In simple terms, Bing Vision allow users to use their phone camera to capture visual data for searches. For example, it can be as simple as capturing an image of a barcode and Bing Vision will return the results of the product associated with that particular barcode. Alternatively, as demonstrated in the video below, Bing Vision also allow users to quickly search texts within an image, and it will recognise the characters and returns with the relevant search results. Check out the video below (Bing Vision starts at around 3:28):

The second icon, which resembles a musical note, seems a bit more obscure as to what it really does. It may be a tie-in to Bing Music search, or it could be simply a shortcut to searching the Zune music marketplace. WMPowerUser.com is suggesting that it might be bringing Shazam-like functionality to search for songs and albums based on microphone input. What do you think it may be? Leave us a comment below.

Regardless of what these new functionality are, this discovery definitely proves that more things are coming as part of the "Mango" update this fall. In fact, during MIX 11 we heard that there would be a lot more stuff coming for Bing in the upcoming "Mango" update, so could this be it? Or is this just the tip of the iceberg? We’ll keep you posted as soon as more information comes out!

LiveSide.net

Even as it fends off what are rumored to be multibillion-dollar acquisition offers from the likes of Google, Twitter seems to be in turmoil — not only on the product side, where it has brought in co-founder Jack Dorsey to try and right the ship, but on the management side as well. A recent Fortune magazine feature paints a portrait of a company being pulled in different directions by its board, by its founders and by its senior executives. So what is missing from this picture? A consistent and tangible vision for what Twitter is, and what it wants to become — and a single person who can stand for and champion that vision.

Who does that sound like? It sounds a lot like Apple. More than almost any other company in recent memory, the iconic computer-maker-turned-consumer-appliance company has a compelling vision of what it stands for — and it doesn’t really have anything to do with a specific product, as Apple has shown by moving into completely new product areas like phones and tablets. It’s more a way of thinking about what your purpose is, and what benefits you bring for users, regardless of what you do. And Steve Jobs is the icon that represents all of that, both for users and for investors. Mark Zuckerberg, for better or worse, has arguably done the same thing at Facebook.

So who fulfills this crucial function at Twitter? Part of the company’s problem is that no one really knows. It used to be co-founder and CEO Evan Williams — but he has been sidelined, whether by the board or by his own desire to move on, or by some combination of those factors. Dick Costolo took over as CEO in October, and there were jokes at the time about how he had planned this coup since joining as chief operating officer a year earlier, but the reality is that within months of his arrival, Williams was taking on less of a role in Twitter’s evolution and now he is effectively gone for good.

The perception is that Costolo was brought in to turn what was an interesting social experiment into a business, with revenues and profits — to justify the millions of dollars that venture capital groups have poured into the company, and the billions that the company is now theoretically worth in the private market. Rightly or wrongly, he has also been blamed for all sorts of product mis-steps, including the ill-fated “Quick Bar,” as well as for the crackdowns on companies like UberMedia and the tightening of restrictions on the company’s API and its relationships with outside developers.

Costolo may be making some headway on the revenue and profitability front, but for a social network or social utility like Twitter — which depends so heavily on the goodwill it has with users and with the broader market of web apps and services — a mission statement like “we really want to make money” isn’t very compelling (saying “Hey, we don’t go down as much as we used to!” isn’t really much of a sales pitch either). And as we’ve seen already, in many cases the pressure to monetize the network directly conflicts with the first goal, which is to maintain and grow the network itself.

What Twitter needs more than anything is compelling features it can add to the existing experience (and hopefully make money from). In some ways, the service hasn’t changed much at all in the past several years, apart from getting larger, and only recently has it started adding related services — in part through partnerships with companies like DataSift, which does analytics, and Sulia for smart aggregation — that it arguably should have had a long time ago. There still isn’t anything approaching a useful Twitter search function, which is a fairly gaping hole for a social information service to have.

So if Jack Dorsey, who came up with the idea for Twitter as a side project at Evan Williams’ company Odeo (along with colleague Noah Glass, who is only now getting a small share of the public profile that Dorsey and Williams and Biz Stone have had as Twitter founders) is rejoining the company to look after product development, does that mean he’s going to be the product visionary? Is he Twitter’s Steve Jobs? As more than one person has noted, one of the big challenges for Dorsey is that he’s already co-founder and CEO of another fast-growing startup, the mobile-payments company Square. And according to Fortune, he doesn’t see his assignment with Twitter as being long term. And what happens when he clashes with Costolo over something like the Quick Bar?

One of the aspects of the Facebook story that hits home when you see the movie The Social Network is that founder Mark Zuckerberg didn’t want to try and monetize the network before it had a chance to grow — before he and the rest of the company could figure out what it was. That was part of his vision. Twitter doesn’t have that luxury any longer: it has to figure all that out soon, and in-fighting over who gets credit for what, or who the board has confidence in, is not helping. But more than anything, the company needs to find that consistent vision and make it obvious.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Scott Maxwell

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