Google launches it's online 'shopping mall'

With Youtube getting on the shopping band wagon and Facebook launching 'deals' it was only a matter of time before Google also took part in the conversation.

On Wednesday, Google launched Boutiques.com, it's very own online shopping centre. The website is designed to give users a personalised shopping experience allowing you to browse through designers, follow them and be followed. It includes bloggers recommendation pages, celebrity style pages and popular trend pages. Perfect for those who need inspiration to build their wardrobe.

Googles Product Management Director, Munjal Shah wrote:

"It lets you find and discover fashion goods by creating your own curated boutique or through a collection of boutiques curated by taste-makers -- celebrities, stylists, designers and fashion bloggers. These days, bloggers, stylists and everyday fashionistas are expressing their sense of style online. We invited them to create boutiques so people could shop their diverse styles. But you have a unique and independent style too, so Boutiques also lets you build your own personalized boutique and get recommendations of products that match your taste."

The site is set up to let users filter their searches by size, silhouette, patterns and colors. Google also is offering what it's calling "inspirational photos." If a user searches for brown boots, photos will pop up on the right showing brown boots with matching outfits.

However, Boutiques.com is currently only available in the U.S. and only for women's fashion. Google has said that it intends to expand but has yet to state when.

New Google phone a 'virtual wallet'

A new Google mobile phone which has a chip embedded that makes it a virtual wallet so people can 'tap and pay' is poised to make its debut.

The successor to the internet firm's Nexus One smartphone runs on fresh 'Gingerbread' software and is fitted with what's called a 'near-field communication chip' for financial transactions, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

"I have here an unannounced product that I carry around with me," Schmidt said while pulling a touch-screen smartphone from a jacket pocket during an on-stage chat at a web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

"You will be able to take these mobile devices that will be able to do commerce," he said, "essentially, bump for everything and eventually replace credit cards. In the industry it is referred to as tap-and-pay."

The near-field chips store personal data that can be transmitted to readers, such as at a supermarket checkout counter, by tapping a handset on a pad.

Schmidt hid markings that might reveal which company made the mobile phone, and playfully stuck with referring to it only as an unannounced product.

Google worked with Taiwanese electronics titan HTC to make the Nexus One handsets it released in January in a high profile entry into the booming smartphone market.

Nexus One smartphones built on Google's Android platform won rave reviews for their capabilities but weren't a hit with buyers.

Inside Retail