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Google Chrome OS
Posted by Stephen McDonald, Developer Relations Engineer, Google Pay
Adding Google Pay as a payment method to your website or Android application provides a secure and fast checkout option for your users. To enable Google Pay, you will first need a Payment Service Provider (PSP). For the integration this means understanding how your payments processing stack works with Google Pay APIs.
To make integration easier, we’ve launched a new open source project containing end-to-end samples for a range of PSPs, demonstrating the entire integration process - from client-side configuration, to server-side integration with the PSPs, using their respective APIs and client libraries where applicable. The project uses Node.js and is written in JavaScript, which most developers should find familiar. Each of the samples in the project are implemented in a consistent fashion, and demonstrate best practices for integrating Google Pay and your preferred PSP with your website or Android application.
A recent study by 451 Research showed that for merchants with over 50% of sales occurring online, 69% of merchants used multiple PSPs. With these new samples, we demonstrate how you can implement an entirely consistent interface to multiple PSPs, streamlining your codebase while also providing more flexibility for the future.
Lastly, we've also added support to both the Web and Android Google Pay sample applications, making it easy to demonstrate the new PSP samples. Simply run the PSP samples project, and configure the Web or Android samples to send their cart information and Google Pay token to the PSP samples app, which will then send the relevant data to the PSP's API and return the PSP's response back.
To start with, we've included support for 6 popular PSPs: Adyen, Braintree, Checkout.com, Cybersource, Square, and Stripe. But that's just the beginning. If you're involved with a PSP that isn't yet included, we've made adding new PSPs to the open source project as simple as possible. Just head on over to the GitHub repository which contains instructions on contributing your preferred PSP to the project.
When you’ve completed your testing, submit your website integration in the Google Pay Business Console. You will need to provide your website’s URL and screenshots to complete the submission.
Integrating Google Pay into your website is a great way to increase conversions and to improve the purchasing experience for your customers, and with these new open source samples, the process is even easier.
What do you think? Follow us on Twitter for the latest updates @GooglePayDevs
Do you have any questions? Let us know in the comments below or tweet using #AskGooglePayDevs.
During a recent visit to Google’s Color, Material and Finish (better known as CMF) studio, I watched while Jess Ng and Jenny Davis opened drawer after drawer and placed object after object on two white tables. A gold hoop earring, a pale pink shell — all pieces of inspiration that Google designers use to come up with new colors for devices, including the just-launched Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro.
“We find inspiration everywhere,” Jenny says. “It’s not abnormal to have a designer come to the studio with a toothbrush or some random object they found on their walk or wherever.”
The CMF team designs how a Google device will physically look and feel. “Color, material and finish are a big part of what defines a product,” Jess, a CMF hardware designer, says. “It touches on the more emotional part of how we decide what to buy.” And Jenny, CMF Manager for devices and services, agrees. “We always joke around that in CMF, the F stands for ‘feelings,’ so we joke that we design feelings.”
The new Pixel 6 comes in Sorta Seafoam and Kinda Coral, while the Pixel 6 Pro comes in Sorta Sunny and Cloudy White, and both are available in Stormy Black. Behind those five shades are years of work, plenty of trial and error…and lots and lots of fine-tuning. “It’s actually a very complex process,” Jenny says.
Mademore complex by COVID-19. Both Jenny and Jess describe the color selection process as highly collaborative and hands-on, which was difficult to accomplish while working from home. Designers aren’t just working with their own teams, but with those on the manufacturing and hardware side as well. “We don’t design color after the hardware design is done — we actually do it together,” Jenny says. The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro’s new premium look and feel influenced the direction of the new colors, and the CMF team needed to see colors and touch items in order to select and eliminate the shades.
They don’t only go hands-on with the devices, they do the same with sources of inspiration. “I remember one time I really wanted to share this color because I thought it would be really appropriate for one of our products, so I ended up sending my boss one of my sweaters through a courier delivery!” Jenny says. “We found creative workarounds.”
The team that designed the new Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro case colors did as well. “The CMF team would make models and then take photos of the models and I would try to go in and look at them in person and physically match the case combinations against the different phone colors,” says Nasreen Shad, a Pixel Accessories product manager. “Then we’d render or photograph them and send them around to the team to review and see if what was and wasn’t working.” In addition to the challenge of working remotely, Nasreen’s team was also working on something entirely new: colorful, translucent cases.
Nasreen says they didn’t want to cover up the phones, but complement them instead, so they went with a translucent tinted plastic. Each device has a case that corresponds to its color family, but you can mix and match them for interesting new shades.
That process involved lots of experimenting. For example, what eventually became the Golden Glow case started out closer to a bronze color, which didn’t pair as well with the Stormy Black phone. “We had to tune it to a peachy shade, so that it looked good with its ‘intended pairing,’ Sorta Sunny, but with everything else, too. That meant ordering more resins and color chips in different tones, but it ended with some really beautiful effects.”
Beautiful effects, and tons of options. “I posted a picture of all of the possible combinations you can make with the phones and the cases and people kept asking me, ‘how many phones did Google just release!?’” Nasreen laughs. “And I had to be like, ‘No, no, no, these are just the cases!’”
Google designers often only know the devices and colors by temporary, internal code names. It's up to their colleagues to come up with the names you see on the Google Store site now. But one person who absolutely knows their official names is Lily Hackett, a Product Marketing Manager who works on a team that names device colors. “The way that we go about color naming is unique,” she says. “We like to play on the color. When you think about it, it’s actually very difficult to describe color, and the colors we often use are subtle — so we like to be specific with our approach to the name.”
Because color can be so subjective (one person’s white and gold dress is another’s black and blue dress), Lily’s team often checks in with CMF designers to make sure the words and names they’re gravitating toward actually describe the colors accurately. “It’s so nice to go to color experts and say, ‘Is this right? Is this a word you would use to describe this color?’”
Lily says their early brainstorming sessions can result in lists of 75 or more options. “It’s truly a testament to our copywriting team. When we were brainstorming for Stormy Black, they had everything under the sun — they had everything under the moon! It was incredible to see how many words they came up with.”
These days, everyone is looking ahead at new colors and new names, but the team is excited to see the rest of the world finally get to see their work. “I couldn’t wait for them to come out,” Lily says. “My favorite color was even the first to sell out on the Google Store! I was like, ‘Yes, everyone else loves it, too!’”
50 years ago this month, Ray Tomlinson sent the very first email. He was a programmer working on ARPANET, the system that laid the groundwork for what would become the internet as we know it today. He tested the messaging system by sending emails to himself, and later said that the first note was probably something like “QWERTYUIOP.”
More than 30 years after this breakthrough, a Google engineer named Paul Buchheit conducted his own email experiments. In a 2005 blog post, Paul described the problem he was trying to solve:
“My email was a mess. Important messages were hopelessly buried, and conversations were a jumble…I couldn't always get to my email because it was stuck on one computer, and web interfaces were unbearably clunky. And I had spam. A lot of it.” These pain points are part of what motivated Paul to come up with a better system — Gmail.
Buchheit created Gmail as a browser-based email program that allowed users to easily search their own messages. “With Gmail, I got the opportunity to change email — to build something that would work for me, not against me.” He wasn’t sure what the reception would be like, but when he released a beta to fellow Googlers, they wanted more.
Eventually, Gmail launched to the public on April 1, 2004. Its search function was lightning fast and it came with 1 GB of storage — 500 times more than prevailing inboxes of the time. But that wasn’t enough to convince people it wasn’t a joke. (The date — April Fool’s Day — likely had something to do with it.)
Despite the launch day hijinks, Gmail won consumers over, and became a central part of the work we do at Google. But we never could have done it if Ray Tomlinson hadn’t hit that @ sign and started it all 50 years ago. To celebrate, we asked a few Googlers to share their favorite Gmail hacks.
Laura Mae Martin, Executive Productivity Advisor
“It's hard to answer old emails when there are shiny new ones coming in. Use features like Snooze and Starred emails and different inbox setups to make it easier to stay on task.”
John Shriver-Blake, Senior Product Manager, Gmail Enterprise
“I’m a fan of confidential mode in Gmail. It lets you protect sensitive information in messages and attachments and ensures that whoever receives the confidential email can’t forward, copy or print it.”
Neena Kamath, Product Lead, Gmail
"What I love about Gmail is how it's evolved over the years. Fifteen years ago, I was obsessed with Conversation View! Back then, having all your emails about a single topic in one place hadn't been done before, and it saved me so much time. Now, I'm obsessed with Smart Reply. It not only saves me time, but also makes me more polite : )!"
Bao Lam, Head of Marketing, Gmail & Chat
“Schedule send in Gmail means that I don’t clutter up people’s inboxes if I’m catching up on emails at odd moments — which is especially helpful when so many of us are working across different time zones.”
You can learn more about the history of email, Gmail and the power of the @ sign over on the Cloud blog.
Earlier this year, Google’s Women Techmakers launched “Tech Bytes,” a series featuring Black women engineers and developers at Google. Tech Bytes supports our broader effort to spotlight Black women in tech by sharing their technical expertise, and creating a space for Black women in the industry to connect.
For our latest episode of Tech Bytes, we sat down with Kendra Claiborne, an Application Engineer at YouTube, to learn more about her role and passion for technology.
Tell us about your path to joining the tech industry. Where were you before?
My journey into tech started when I was eight years old, building websites for fun and searching online to learn how the computer works. My passion for programming led me to pursue a degree in Computer Science at the University at Buffalo. During my undergraduate years, I took an internship at a startup that specialized in building custom applications on the Salesforce platform. I was very unfamiliar with Salesforce when I first started, but I was excited to learn something new. Since that internship, I’ve built both frontend (user-facing) and backend solutions on the Salesforce platform for customers in many different industries. Those opportunities led me to the YouTube Content Partnerships Systems team in 2020.
Tell us about your role on that team. What do you do day to day?
I’m an Application Engineer, and I’ve carried my past experience into this role by focusing on building frontend and backend solutions on the Salesforce platform. Each day is slightly different from the next. My team applies the agile methodology for software development, which means we deliver feature requests or fix bugs incrementally instead of all at once. We participate in two-week “sprints” to get these done most efficiently. Leading up to a sprint, I am laser focused on mapping out the design for a feature request, which involves a lot of research and collaboration with the team and project lead. Once we've defined our approach and the tasks required to accomplish it, we focus on building out the features. I’ll spend the next 5-8 days coding, testing and submitting my code for peer review — after which, it will get deployed to our staging environments. A staging environment is like a testing ground, where we can make sure our code is working as intended before we push it live. At the end of the sprint, if our deliverables have been approved for Quality Assurance (QA) — meaning they have reliable performance and functionality — they'll be released to production.
What was the most important class or training that you took? What was a key technical takeaway?
During my undergraduate studies, I took a Data Structures and Algorithms Design course. That class was instrumental in building my problem solving skills. It taught me how to more effectively organize, store, and solve problems based on inputs of data.
Tell us about your Tech Bytes episode. What message did you want to get across?
In my Tech Bytes episode, I discuss three different topics: communicating changes across separate systems through the Publisher-Subscriber Model; building modular, reusable code, which separates functionality into independent pieces of code; and the importance of Test Driven Development. I hope that viewers learn something new and get inspired to find out more about these subjects — and maybe even use them in a future project.
Check out Kendra’s Tech Bytes episode for more, and explore other interviews on our Tech Bytes YouTube channel. You can also learn more about our efforts to spotlight Black women in tech on the Google’s Women Techmakers website.
Note: For this edition, Jacquelline Fuller is passing the pen to her colleague Hector Mujica, who leads our Economic Opportunity work, to share more about how we approach skill building and recent support from Google.org to honor Hispanic Heritage Month.
One of our goals is to help people — especially those without college degrees — gain the skills they need to pursue in-demand, higher-paying careers. This is a topic that is deeply personal to me, as a Latino in tech, and that is important to Google, as a company that strives to create greater equity and access to opportunity — particularly for underserved communities.
We know that 80% of middle-class jobs in the U.S. require a strong knowledge of digital skills, and that these jobs often pay better. That’s why we partner with nonprofit organizations to help them bring digital skilling solutions to historically underserved and excluded people, like the Latino community. We support organizations like the Hispanic Federation and Per Scholas to use solutions, like the Google Career Certificate and other digital skill training programs, that help job seekers gain the right skills to land jobs in the digital economy. These organizations provide not only training, but also the wraparound support needed to make sure participants can access jobs and success at them.
There’s not a single solution to tackle these economic challenges. In an effort to advance the dialog and create fulfilling opportunities for all, we’re also supporting research to unpack how to best support Latino digital inclusion in the workforce with organizations like [email protected] and Aspen Institute’s Latino and Society Program.
To mark Hispanic Heritage Month (which runs September 15-October 15), we’re announcing a $1M grant to the Latino Community Foundation’s Latino Entrepreneur Fund to support Latino micro-entrepreneurs across rural and urban communities in California; and donating $1M+ in ads to participants in a new Latino Founders Fund, helping them reach new audiences and address funding inequities. We’re also supporting Latinos searching for jobs: we announced a $1 million reinvestment in the Hispanic Federation.
Frankie Miranda is the President and CEO of the Hispanic Federation. Their mission is to empower the Latino community by increasing the capacity of Latino-led and Latino-serving community-based organizations (CBOs) with funding, technical assistance and a resource sharing network.
Rosalva Gallardo is a Program Manager for Google Shopping.
Google believes that to have sustainable economic growth, we must have inclusive growth. It is why we developed the Grow with Google digital skills training program, which provides free training to help individuals grow their careers and businesses. Through our digital skilling programs and Google.org grantees, we have helped put nearly 170,000 Americans into new jobs, and of these, 67% are from underrepresented groups, including 44% women. Our Google Career Certificates, available on Coursera, have helped people enter high-growth career fields including Data Analytics, IT Support, Project Management and User Experience Design. Because we believe that collective action is key to success, we created a network of more than 150 companies who accept the Grow with Google Certificates as credentials for roles, including Walmart, Infosys, Verizon and of course, Google (and we are hiring, by the way!).
Today, we’re announcing an expansion of our Google Career Certificates program, including furthering our partnerships with community colleges, translating our Google Career Certificates into college credit and partnering with four-year universities to prepare students for in-demand jobs.
Community colleges are critical to workforce development and economic mobility, providing accessible education options for millions of Americans and opening doors to opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach. With 44% of American undergraduates attending community colleges, and as the primary institutions serving students from underrepresented groups, there is no doubt they play an invaluable role across the U.S.
Beginning today, the Google Career Certificate program is free for all community colleges and career and technical education (CTE) high schools to add to their curriculum. We will also be partnering with the American Association of Community Colleges, the primary advocacy group for U.S. community colleges and their 12 million students. All of these schools will now be able to onboard this curriculum for free.
All our Google Career Certificates are now recommended by the American Council on Education for up to 12 college credits (the equivalent to four college courses). For the more than 36 million Americans who have some post-secondary education but no college degree, Google Career Certificates can help provide an affordable on-ramp back to earning their diploma.
We are also partnering with four-year universities that are accepting credit for the Google Career Certificates, including Northeastern, Purdue Global, Arizona State University and SUNY, to help increase earning potential and provide students with direct pathways to jobs. For example, a psychology major who acquires data analysis skills can unlock more than 100,000 additional entry-level jobs paying on average $60,000, versus $39,000 for psychology majors overall.
What inspires us to do this work are the real-life stories we hear every day. Like Chelsea Rucker, who was struggling to make ends meet before she took the Google IT Support Certificate through our grantee Goodwill and got a job at Google. Or Natalie Burns, who, while attending community college in Texas, earned her IT certificate and got a job in cybersecurity with a salary three times higher than her previous retail role. These are the stories that drive us, and we will continue to help people develop the digital skills they need to participate in this economy, and gain confidence that they have valuable options for their future.
