Google is one of my favorite large companies, as I love their products and like the culture that is promoted by the management. Google is very strong in five markets, and has the potential to become stronger in two or three other markets as well. Right now, Google is dominant in search, email, advertising, mobile, and video. I think Google has the potential to become dominant in either cloud computing or social, and the potential to become a major player in payments both online and offline. Here are a few acquisitions that would make sense to me to defend Google's products and make advances with other products.
Square - Square makes sense for quickly breaking into the mobile payments market. They currently have over 800,000 merchants using the service according to Jack Dorsey. Plus, Google Wallet may not make sense for business owners. I like the idea of Google pushing the adoption of NFC stickers, but think that maybe near field communication technology will not be used by store owners as quickly as Google would like. Square is easy to use, and allows store owners and employees to accept payments anywhere. It would be a pricey buy as Square has a valuation of more than 2 billion dollars, but having a presence in most storefronts throughout the country does sound lucrative.
Either FeeFighters or Stripe (or maybe both) - PayPal has a pretty good product, but I think both of these companies have payment products that Google could use to become a leader in the space. Right now, Google does have an online payment product called Google Checkout, which looks good but isn't used across the internet like PayPal. FeeFighters has a great product called Samurai for online payments and I have a guy working on a product using Samurai right now, and Stripe also looks good. I think acquisitions of either of these companies could help Google gain more momentum in helping people pay online.
This is a list I hope to grow over the coming days and weeks, but I figure it's a decent start even though it only focuses on payments!
You can follow me @kaufman_jack.
I agree with you for wanting to acquire Square since it would be a great stepping stone from where we are now with payments to where we should ultimately be, i.e. nfc.
ReplyDeleteHey Adam! Thanks for the comment! Yeah, Square does seem to be an interesting acquisition target right now. I have a few other companies to add to the list, but I need to think a little bit more if they fit into the markets I mentioned. Thanks for reading!
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