The founder of Coinbridge, Ryan Donahue has recently launched a new startup company called HourTown. HourTown is an online scheduling and marketing platform that allows millions of small business owners to transact online in a more meaningful way.
An article from Ireland’s Radio Telefís Éireann (RTE) about the recent announcement to add 300 jobs to eBay/PayPal’s Dublin facility.
Sincere apologies to all my loyal readers for not updating the blog lately. I’m sure all of you must have been feeling a deep sense of unease over the past two weeks, wondering “where is he?”.
That last part was supposed to be funny…
In truth, I’ve been hiding out lately, and for good reason. Our team has been working hard on a new application that I think I’ve mentioned before, and I’ll be ready to announce what we’re working on sometime in the coming weeks. There is an element of payment to it (of course) but that’s not really the focus. Stay tuned Coinbloggers. I think you’re going to find this one interesting.
A very interesting post from the Google blog :
“Many of you are probably already familiar with the Google Account. You use it to sign in and pay for a number of Google services, like Google Video and Google Earth. We’re now introducing similar functionality on Google Base.”
This just in: recent graduates of my alma mater may now have a shot at launching a career in mobile payments without the need to leave the Portland metro area.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been a little too busy lately, and haven’t been following Scott’s blog closely enough, but today was the first time I came across Paywi, a mobile payments startup based in Portland, Oregon . If you recall, a different mobile payments startup from the Pacific Northwest made clear their strategy for solving the infamous chick ‘n’ egg problem by starting off with a focus on a rather specific vertical - Craigslist. Paywi’s deployment strategy - arguably the toughest challenge for anyone trying to launch a service like this — wasn’t clearly stated on their website.
The Google Wallet product that everyone has been talking about over the past year will apparently be called “Gbuy”. Here’s a Wall Street Journal article discussing the product and how PayPal is viewing the threat from Google.
A half-baked idea for how to differentiate a merchant ecommerce service:
I just did a Google search for “sell one product”. I saw plenty of services and products that would allow me to setup a website, buy a shopping cart, apply for a merchant account, do some advertising, and eventually start selling my product; but what if I didn’t want to go through all that?
I know. I could get a PayPal account and sell my item on eBay, right? I guess that would probably be the fast-track way for the average person to sell something online. But if it were me, I wouldn’t want to use the “average way” that everyone else is using. I’m the type of person that would be willing to pay extra for a premium, one-off merchant experience. I would pay extra to have an elegant, disposable e-store that would make my product look fantastic, and make me look professional – and definitely not cheap or cheesy.
For a one-time, flat rate I want to upload a photo and description of what I want to sell and have someone else take care of the details (fee would include Google ad purchase, transaction cost for the credit card payment, and maybe some graphic design customization if needed) and publish the thing in less than twenty four hours.
Someone out there is probably offering this, but I couldn’t find it.
When PayPal begins to sell Verisign’s Payflow Pro and Payflow Link products sometime this Spring, they’re going to face some interesting challenges. It’s hard enough to effectively communicate the difference between PayPal’s Website Payments Pro product, and PayPal Standard. Come Spring, if PayPal plans to offer the two Verisign products side by side with the PayPal Pro and Standard products, it’s going to 2X as difficult to effectively market the differences between these things to merchants. Will PayPal decide to phase out some of its newly inherited product redundancy in order to keep things simple? I’ve never seen the numbers, but if it were me, Verisign’s Link product would go “bye bye”. Will any of these four product lines be asked to leave the PayPal party?
A friend of mine recently asked me to have a chat with Chuck Groom, one of the creators of a new service called Billmonk. When Chuck first began to explain his business to me, I’ll admit, it took me a few minutes to decide if this was an original concept, or just PayPal’s “group money request” feature with an improved interface around it. After talking with Chuck and signing up for Billmonk though, I realized it has nothing to do with PayPal at all (at the present time). In fact, right now Billmonk doesn’t support any type of ecommerce gateway.
Billmonk has big potential, but before it can be a “real thing” it needs to integrate a payment engine of some kind in order to really fill the need. According to Chuck, it won’t be long before they do. Till then, Billmonk is well, kind of like a wiki for small debts and IOU’s between people you know and trust. I recommend you check it out.
An entity called MLON Ventures is acquiring a 60% stake in Paychest, the self-proclaimed “one of a kind 3rd party payment system”. If you’re not familiar with Paychest, you can review the product functionality they plan to offer, as well as their business strategy for competing with PayPal, on this impressive website.
