Apple introduced support for dedicated transit cards in Apple Wallet six years ago, and it has since expanded to include San Francisco’s Clipper card, Washington DC’s SmarTrip card, Los Angeles’ TAP card, and Canada’s PRESTO card. New York City’s OMNY card will soon join the fun of Apple Wallet integration, according to the MTA. The MTA is set to phase out the MetroCard fully within the next year, requiring OMNY to be widely available and easy to use. Major updates involving the OMNY rollout include the launch of a mobile virtual OMNY card for normal commuters and students in Q4 2025 and new integration within the MTA app to manage your OMNY card. If things go according to plan, users will be able to add an OMNY card to Apple or Google Wallet in the coming months, just like in Washington, DC, and San Francisco.
Google’s AI Overviews which summarizes results from the web in a AI-generated text form, is now used by more than 1.5 billion users, . Circle to Search, is now available on more than 250 million devices
By Google’s estimation, AI Overviews is now used by more than 1.5 billion users monthly across over 100 countries. AI Overviews compiles results from around the web to answer certain questions and will show AI-generated text at the top of the Google Search results page. While the feature has dampened traffic to some publishers, Google sees it and other AI-powered search capabilities as potentially meaningful revenue drivers and ways to boost engagement on Search. During its Q1 2025 earnings call, Google highlighted the growth of its other AI-based search products as well, including Circle to Search. Circle to Search, which lets you highlight something on your smartphone’s screen and ask questions about it, is now available on more than 250 million devices, Google said — up from around 200 million devices as of late last year. Circle to Search usage rose close to 40% quarter-over-quarter, according to the company. Google also noted in its call that visual searches on its platforms are growing at a steady clip. According to CEO Sundar Pichai, searches through Google Lens, Google’s multimodal AI-powered search technology, have increased by 5 billion since October. The number of people shopping on Lens was up over 10% in Q1, meanwhile.
Google’s Android devices would be able to include SIM in backups in addition to contacts, call history, device settings, apps & app data, SMS & MMS, potentially making it that much easier to swap phones
Device backups currently save things such as your app list, contacts, SMS/MMS/RCS messages, call history, and some device settings as well. Combined with Google Photos for photo/video backup, that makes it easier to swap phones, especially in the case that your previous device is lost, stolen, or broken. Google is apparently looking to extend on this. New findings suggest that Android devices may soon be able to include your SIM in a device backup, potentially making it that much easier to swap phones. Google’s services would be able to “back up contacts, call history, device settings, apps & app data, SMS & MMS messages, and SIMs.” This is very likely referring to eSIM rather than a physical SIM card, but the utility here is obvious. Google is already working to make it easier to transfer an eSIM between devices, and the ability to back that SIM up would just make things all the more painless when restoring from a device you no longer have access to. There are still a lot of questions around how SIM backup on Android would work, including how carriers would be involved, but it’s a nice idea. As for when it might be implemented, that’s not remotely clear either.
Visa’s 2Q 25: U.S. payments volume grew 6% and international payments volume grew 9%.; 50% of Global eCommerce transactions are tokenized, “tap to everything” strategy continues to bear fruit
U.S. payments volume grew 6% and international payments volume grew 9%. Cross-border volume, excluding intra Europe, rose 13% in constant dollars. Within the U.S., debit volumes were up 9% (in constant dollar terms) outpacing credit volumes of 4%. Ryan McInerney, CEO, said that total credentials were up 7%, and the firm added 1 billion tokens to 13.7 billion. “Nearly 50% of our eCommerce transactions, globally, are tokenized,” he said. Visa’s “tap to everything” strategy continues to bear fruit, McInerney said, adding that tap to phone added 2 million transacting device terminals since the last quarter. Tap to Pay penetration is at 76% globally, he said, with the U.S. passing 60% for the first time. McInerney also pointed to stablecoins as an area of promise as “two important capabilities are interoperability and programmability. We have continued to expand our interoperability, including with our first seven day a week stablecoin settlement, recently surpassing $200 million in cumulative stablecoin settlement volume,” he said. Commercial volumes were up 6% in constant dollars, with Visa Direct transactions up 28% to 3 billion transactions. “To capture the accounts receivable and accounts payable opportunity, we are utilizing product innovations such as embedded finance solutions to meet payers where they manage their business to drive adoption of cards,” McInerney said. Value-added services revenues were up 22%.
Google CEO says Gemini could be added as a built-in option to iPhones this year
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said his company’s AI service, Gemini, could soon become part of Apple’s iPhone. Pichai said he is hopeful that Gemini will be added as a built-in option on Apple’s smartphone this year. Apple’s AI system, Apple Intelligence, uses its own models for most AI tasks available on the company’s phones, tablets and computers. However, the company has partnered with ChatGPT from OpenAI for integration with its Siri voice assistant and Writing Tools, a feature for creating and editing text. Pichai said he hopes that Gemini, a ChatGPT rival, will be added as an additional AI option on Apple products. He said he spoke with Apple CEO Tim Cook on the topic last year and hopes to have a deal hammered out by mid-2025. Google is in the middle of its largest AI push yet. The company has integrated AI across its product lines, with 15 of its products each having more than half a billion users now using Gemini models. AI Overviews in search have reached 1.5 billion monthly users. “We continue to see that usage growth is increasing as people learn that search is more useful for more of their queries,” Pichai said adding that AI Mode queries tend to be twice as long as those in traditional search.
Google CEO says Gemini could be added as a built-in option to iPhones this year
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said his company’s AI service, Gemini, could soon become part of Apple’s iPhone. Pichai said he is hopeful that Gemini will be added as a built-in option on Apple’s smartphone this year. Apple’s AI system, Apple Intelligence, uses its own models for most AI tasks available on the company’s phones, tablets and computers. However, the company has partnered with ChatGPT from OpenAI for integration with its Siri voice assistant and Writing Tools, a feature for creating and editing text. Pichai said he hopes that Gemini, a ChatGPT rival, will be added as an additional AI option on Apple products. He said he spoke with Apple CEO Tim Cook on the topic last year and hopes to have a deal hammered out by mid-2025. Google is in the middle of its largest AI push yet. The company has integrated AI across its product lines, with 15 of its products each having more than half a billion users now using Gemini models. AI Overviews in search have reached 1.5 billion monthly users. “We continue to see that usage growth is increasing as people learn that search is more useful for more of their queries,” Pichai said adding that AI Mode queries tend to be twice as long as those in traditional search.
Google Messages rolling out ‘Unsubscribe’ button to stop SMS and RCS spam
Google Messages is gaining a new “Unsubscribe” feature to combat spam and other unwanted SMS texts or RCS chats from business senders. “Unsubscribe” is for businesses that send “unwanted messages in Google Messages, like promotions and other non-essential content.” The new button can appear at the bottom of the chat (just above the text field) or in the conversation’s overflow menu. A sheet then slides up asking “Why are you unsubscribing?”: Not signed up, Too many messages, No longer interested, Spam, or Other. In the case of spam, there’s a “Report this sender” option. Behind-the-scenes, Google Messages sends “STOP” to the sender from your number. Afterwards, “you should no longer receive non-essential messages from that sender. Unsubscribe applies to: 1) RCS for Business messages in the United States, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom. 2) SMS or MMS messages in the United States from short codes (phone numbers with 5-6 digits) and alphanumeric senders.
Adyen sees growing demand for embedded finance offerings- . platforms net revenue reached €55.5 million, up 63% year over year
Adyen’s first quarter announcement provided ample evidence of embedded finance’s momentum as platforms and marketplaces seek to build payments into their own business models. Platforms net revenue reached €55.5 million, up 63% year over year, per the company’s financials, with significant demand in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) segment. Processed volumes were up 61% excluding the impact of eBay, to €314.8 billion. The number of platform business customers, stood at 177,000, up from 96,000 in the same time frame last year. Adyen also said that it has 30 platform customers that process more than €1 billion annually, up from 19 a year ago. Issuing volumes have increased, though management added that this part of the business is relatively small and will take time to grow. Within the digital pillar, net revenues surged 13% to €320.4 million, on the heels of demand in the content and subscriptions verticals. Unified Commerce — comprised of Adyen’s operations that connect online and offline payments for client firms’ cross-channel efforts — saw revenue growth of 31% to €158.8 million, with growth in the retail and the food and beverage segments. Processed volumes gained 37%, while 592 customers leveraged the Unified Commerce operations to process payments across multiple regions, up 77 customers year over year.
Amazon launches Nova Premier, its most capable AI model yet- has a context length of 1 million tokens, meaning it can analyze around 750,000 words in one go
Amazon released what the company claims is the most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio). It is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Amazon says that Premier excels at “complex tasks” that “require deep understanding of context, multi-step planning, and precise execution across multiple tools and data sources.” Nova Premier, which has a context length of 1 million tokens, meaning it can analyze around 750,000 words in one go, is weaker on certain benchmarks than flagship models from rival AI companies such as Google. In bright spots for Premier, the model does well on tests for knowledge retrieval and visual understanding, SimpleQA and MMMU, according to Amazon’s internal benchmarking. In Bedrock, Premier is priced at $2.50 per 1 million tokens fed into the model and $12.50 per 1 million tokens generated by the model. Importantly, Premier isn’t a “reasoning” model. As opposed to models like OpenAI’s o4-mini and DeepSeek’s R1, it can’t take additional time and computing to carefully consider and fact-check its answers to questions.