When Google Checkout was launched in 2006 it's unique pricing model brought online payment processing to a point where it was cost effective for small and large businesses alike.  It had a low transaction processing cost of 1.5% + £0.15 per transaction and rewarded AdWords customers by waiving the transaction charges on up to a total of 10 times their monthly ad spend.  For small businesses this meant that there was a cost effective method that allowed them to add card payments to their available payment methods.

On March 11th Google issued an email informing Checkout customers that the pricing structure would be changing effective 5th May.  Free transaction processing from AdWords has been removed and the simple transaction processing change has been replaced with a tiered model not too dissimilar to other providers ranging from 1.4% to 3.4%+£0.20.

These changes mean that transaction processing changes will increase for all customers who process less that £55,000 per month, in the case of those processing less than £6,000 the charges will double.  And that is before you take into account the removal of the free processing.  Google stated reasons for the pricing increases as this:

Google is committed to the continued growth and development of Checkout. These pricing changes are necessary in order for us to continue to enhance user features and functionality going forward.

I have always supported Google, their innovation has helped drive our industry forward and this has rarely been at the expense of their customers.  I understand that Google must set their prices in a way that allows their business to grow and move forwards, however,  I find it disappointing that in the current economic climate that Google have chosen to implement pricing changes that put further financial pressure on many small organisations who are already finding times hard.

Full information about the Google Checkout pricing model can be found on Google's Checkout Fees page.

Judge dismisses Google lawsuit via BBC NEWS | Technology.

I've gotta say this one made me smile, I've even created a new tag for it "only in America"...

A legal claim by a Pitsburg couple, The Borings, that a picture of their house on Google Street View caused them "mental suffering" blah, blah, blah!

I for one am happy to see this case thrown out of court.  The whole "sue you" culture that has evolved in the US and is now spreading into UK culture is wrong, in my opinion it lessens us as a people and trivialises true suffering .  

It would have been so easy for Google to pay the $25,000 to make this go away, they could have paid the money and essentially press the same button the Boring's didn't even bother to.  But to have done so would have lent credence to this idiotic claim, so Google stuck to their guns and won.

Got any other stories of ludicrous "sue you" cases being thrown out?  Leave a comment.

Yesterday Google released Google Mobile App for the iPhone an application that provides a central point to launch all your Google applications from, it also features a search facility that is location aware and boasts voice recognition.

TechCrunch featured an article First Look At Google Mobile App For iPhone: Great But Not Second Coming which examples the applicaiton features and compares it's results to those shown my google in their demonstration video.

I this article I'm going to look at how well the application performed when I tried some basic searches in the office this morning.

Google Mobile App: Settings

My first observation was the the voice search button was not on the search dialog, slightly deflated and wondering if the feature was not available on the UK version I headed to settings to see if there was anything there that could be done.  A quick review of the settings revealed that Voice Search was not enabled by default and needed to be switched on.

 I also noticed that there was a caveat stating that it worked best with North American accents, so considering the number of accents there are in North America I thought let's see what if makes of a proper Northern accent

The Test

To make the test a fair one I decided to pick some common things that people are likely to search for... or at least I would search for  I picked four broad categories Food, Drink, Entertainment and Travel and tried to search for things within them, so my chosen search terms were:

• Food
  Pizza, Chinese Food, Indian Food, Supermarket 
• Drink
  Pub, Beer, Lager, Vodka 
• Entertainment
  Cinema, World of Warcraft 
• Travel
  Train Station

Six out of the eleven searches returned the right results, well actually six and a half, Vodka initially returned Monica but I decided to try again and got the right results.  Here are the screenshots of the search results for each search in no particular order.