04 August 2006 | Author: C. Philip

Google's Master plan...the Google Mastercard?

For the last few years we have become used to murmurs and rumours about Google's intentions to enter the online payments market. We have seen the launches of products such as the 'Google Checkout' and the 'Google Wallet', and keen Googlers are now ready and waiting for the launch if Google's very own 'PayPal Killer' (their words, not ours!). Google's recent purchase of the domain name googlemastercard.com has now added fuel to this particular fire and speculation is rife over the future of Google's relationship with the online payments market.

ZDNet's Garett Rogers originally uncovered that Google had registered googlemastercard.com. It is also worth noting that the work of Rogers was also responsible for previously discovering Google's registration of the domain name Gdrive.com. On this occasion, Google's registration was processed through another company.

So what could this registration indicate?

The move by Google to buy googlemastercard.com could mean that a Google credit, debit or ATM card could be in the pipeline. Although cloudy, the original report of the acquisition speculates around the possibility of the card being for AdSense
account holders too. AdSense is a program designed by Google that can generate advertising revenue for your website by posting content-specific text and image ads on pages based on visitors' search requests.

Many budding online bloggers are curious to see that there may be a future link up with Google and MasterCard. It could perhaps be something very similar to PayPal and MasterCard's situation. This collaboration saw the launch of the PayPal Plus Credit Card which was designed to address online security and convenience. The card also offers a rewards program letting you earn points on any purchases you make with it.



Could the guys at Google be working on something similar, and bigger, with MasterCard? If so we could envisage their penetration causing a severe stir up of the online payments market...online, and perhaps even off? We all know that Google has always shown determined focus when launching products in new markets, often resulting in phenomenal success. We also know that they have no shortage of money to burn with such projects which always makes following Google's expansion so exciting.

If we take a pessimistic view however we could look on the registration of googlemastercard.com as simply one more URL added to Google's list of domain names. This could realistically be the case since Google also own the domain Googleporn.com! The company could simply be marking out cyber space territory to prevent others from snatching it.

So will Google's recent domain registration bring round another Google 'Mega-Product' for the online payment market? We can but speculate, however Google has done and is doing just about everything else!

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