Reports are coming in that Google acquired Canadian mobile payments startup Zetawire way back in August of this year, which likely helped fuel the recent inclusion of near field communications technology in the Nexus S and Android 2.3. The sum of the acquisition is unknown, but given the fact there were only two to four employees, the price was probably pretty small.
The company does not appear to have even had a website (at least they don’t anymore), but they did file one patent for something they were calling ‘a payment system, an advertising system, and an identity management system” all rolled into one. How much of Zetawire’s technology actually made it into the Nexus S or 2.3 remains to be seen, but chances are Zetawire left some kind of footprint.
[via TechCrunch]