Try including the play services library as a
library project in your build, and not as a ready-built jar file. The second article you link to talks about problems with the library if you don't do that, although it mentions a different error message.
You can just delete the onCreateOptionsMenu method if you're not using a menu. It references R.menu.main, which is given in that article AFAICT.
Also, the <meta-data> element that has the map key is a child of <application>, not of <activity>. As I've mentioned before, software development is all about paying attention to detail :-)