Square aka SQ

This week Square—the mobile payments company founded by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey—went public with the stock symbol SQ. Square is now valued at $2.9 billion, slightly down from its valuation of $6 billion late last year, and has been introducing new products around Apple Pay, which will allow small businesses to accept contactless payments that integrate with the Square ecosystem. Square’s peer-to-peer payment system, Square Cash, has seen widespread adoption, but will see new competition from Apple Pay when Apple integrates peer-to-peer payments into iMessage next year.

Pandora + Rdio

This week Rdio—one of the first players in the mobile streaming space—was acquired by Pandora for $75 million, and its service will be shutting down in the next few weeks. Rdio was one of the first and best music streaming platforms, but failed to compete over the years with new giants like Spotify, Google Play Music, and Apple Music. While Rdio’s aesthetic and user-interface design inspired a whole generation of mobile apps and even the iOS design aesthetic, in recent years Rdio was unable to keep up with growing subscriber numbers from Spotify, and so Pandora is going to be acquiring Rdio’s talent and intellectual property to build a new music streaming platform of its own. The new service from Pandora will launch in 2016, and in the meantime, Rdio users need to find a new place to find their music.

Google+ goes Material

Google+ users, what’s left of you, can rejoice. The service received a Material redesign this week that brought responsive design to the website and a new focus on communities and interests to the social network. As Google has started to decouple its core services like Google Hangouts and Google Photos from the Google+ social network, this redesign represents the first major enhancement to the service in several years, demonstrating Google’s renewed interest in bringing relevant content and communities to users. You can check out the new Google+ with the Google+ app or by going to plus.google.com.

Apple Pay, EH!

Apple Pay came to Canada this week, allowing American Express members to add their cards to their iPhone 6 and later or to their Apple Watch. Apple Pay has quickly become the frontrunner in the mobile contactless payment space, competing with the likes of Android Pay, Samsung Pay, and a slew of smaller companies, all focused on bringing mobile payments through NFC terminals to the masses. With iOS 9, Apple brought all new features to Apple Pay, allowing apps to distribute loyalty cards and gift cards that make use of the NFC antennae, just like a credit card from a bank. As Apple Pay expands to more countries, it remains to be seen how adoption rates will differ and how the marketing space of this burgeoning space will be distributed amongst the tech giants competing for it.

Google’s crazy new feature

Google has long been able to index the content inside of native apps to present them in search results, but now Google is taking it a step further, allowing users to stream full native apps to their phone straight from Google search results on Android. For a handful of apps, if users see search results that represent in-app content, Google will stream the app’s interface to their phone and allow them to complete a transaction, or find more information from within that app inside of Google search. The feature is still in beta, requires a Wi-Fi connection, and is available for users running Android Lollipop or later.