Former Google Wallet Execs Raise $7 Million to Personalize Offline Retail

Jonathan Wall’s first attempt to tackle the offline payment experience didn’t go exactly as he had hoped.

Wall (above left) was one of two founding engineers behind Google Wallet, a mobile payment platform that launched in 2011 and promised to let users tap and pay for items in stores. Google Wallet initially struggled to gain widespread adoption due to the reluctance of carriers and businesses to embrace the NFC technology that Wallet depended on. For Wall, however, there was an even more basic problem: the Google Wallet team turned its focus to the wrong thing.

“There was kind of a tectonic shift even before we made it to market,” Wall told Mashable in a recent interview. “There were a lot of PayPal folks that saw the payment itself as being the prize rather than the data… The opportunity we were hoping to pursue was the untapped potential of the data in the retailer’s walls and using it to help the retailer.” Read more…

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