Every year the World Economic Forum picks a couple dozen or so up-and-coming technology startups from around the world and dubs them Technology Pioneers. In the past, Technology Pioneers have included Google and Mozilla. Last year, Mint, Etsy, and Brightcove joined the club.
Today, the World Economic Forum is naming 26 Technology Pioneers for 2010. They include Twitter, Amiando, Playfish, Obopay, Innovid, Bloom Energy, and Boston Power. Twitter probably should have been named last year, before its huge growth spurt, but better late than never.
Amiando, based in Germany, is an online ticket service which is going gangbusters. (It competes with Eventbrite). Playfish is a social gaming company based in the UK, which was recently bought by Electronic Arts for $300 million. → Read More
Earlier today, Nokia announced that it was launching Nokia Money, a new payment service powered by Obopay that allows users to send money to friends, merchants, and service companies simply by using their phone numbers. The service will be showcased in early September at the Nokia World conference, with plans to roll it out to select markets in 2010.
As we wrote when news broke of Obopay’s $70 million funding round (of which Nokia was a major participant in), one of the biggest markets for this technology is in regions like India, where many people have phones with pre-paid SIM cards but don’t have bank accounts. And judging by Nokia’s press release, which emphasizes that there are “4 billion mobile phone users and only 1.6 billion bank accounts”, the company seems to agree. → Read More
When news came out earlier this week that mobile payments company Obopay raised another $70 million, effectively doubling its total funding raised to date, some observers were surprised at the sheer size of the round. While others expressed skepticism that mobile payments would ever really take off, at least in the U.S.
But the bigger opportunity for Obopay and mobile payments in general is not in the U.S. It is in India and other parts of the world where a large portion of the population don’t have bank accounts. These are the so-called “unbanked.” There are billions of them and their relative spending power is on an upwards trajectory. → Read More
Today, at the Next Web conference, I met the founders of Scred, a Finnish startup that lets friends manage their their debts to each other. Scred is an application that makes it easy to split up tabs at restaurants or bars. You can download a mobile version to your phone, for easy bill-splitting calculations after a few rounds. Competitors include BillMonk, Buxfer, and Obopay. But Scred has a few European twists. Managing currency conversions is no problem. If I am chipping in for a meal in Amsterdam, it can tell me how much I owe in dollars and how much my Dutch friends owe in Euros. It also lets you pool debts between friends. So if I owe you $5, and you owe our mutual friend Nancy $7, it automatically allocates my $5 to Nancy. CrunchBase Information Scred BillMonk Buxfer obopay Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Steve Case wants to make some new friends on Facebook. Today, his startup Revolution Money launched a friend-to-friend payment application on Facebook called MoneyExchange (as of this writing, it is still waiting to be added to the Facebook Application directory, but click on the link above and it should take you there if you are a Facebook member). Just like PayPal, which already has an app on Facebook, MoneyExchange lets you send money to your friends or receive money from them. Of course, if they want the money, they have to sign up for the application, and link it to their bank account. But that’s exactly how PayPal went viral. Revolution Money is betting that putting a payment service inside a social network will multiply that viral effect. Sending and receiving funds on Money Exchange is free (as it is on PayPal for funds between two PayPal members). Dave Cautin, the senior vice president in charge of Revolution Money’s online business explains, “It is an opportunity to very easily collect money from your friends and associates. It could be used by housemates sharing the rent, or friends chipping in to buy a group gift.” Of course, there are many other apps that do this on Facebook already, including ChipIn, CashFly, and PayFriends, which are all based on PayPal. OboPay, which lets you text money to your friends from a mobile phone, also has a Facebook app. None of these are particularly popular, however. PayPal has 65 active daily users on Facebook. ChipIn has 81. CashFly and OboPay each have 3. Revolution Money sees an opening here. “Massive online communities will have a currency,” predicts Cautin. And he wants Revolution money to be it. “For us, social networking is our laser focus,” he says. The company is also working on integrating the payment service into AIM, and offers it through its own Website. In truth, Revolution Money sees MoneyExchange as a loss leader for its real business, which is the RevolutionCard, its credit card that undercuts Visa and Mastercard. It has no intention of making money off of MoneyExchange by charging for transactions because in its eyes the online payment service is just a way to build up a valuable network of potential credit card customers. You can be sure that every MoneyExchange member will get an offer for the RevolutionCard. Steve Case is just seeding the market. CrunchBase Information Revolution → Read More
Slowly, mobile payments are starting to creep their way into the US. Though foreign countries tend to use the service more, the US will eventually catch on when we all realize that paying your bills while out and about can be easy. Verizon has now announced that it will be using Obopay’s service to allow customers to send mobile payments to each other and stores by using their cellphone. The service will allow customers to walk into participating stores and pay for items by waving a cellphone in front of a register. Both prepay and billing options will be available, with MasterCard getting in on the prepay deal. Though convenient, don’t expect to be paying for a Snickers Bar at the 7-11 anytime soon. A lot more stores need to participate in the program before Verizon and Obopay’s plan can be effective. At this time, Verizon has yet to announce how much the service will cost. Verizon to offer mobile payments with Obopay [Reuters] → Read More
Social/mobile payments site Billmonk had a mini merger with competitor Obopay last month (we called it a “battle for relevance” since PayPal has a strong product offering in the mobile space as well). Buxfer is another social money Y Combinator funded company that softly launched last September. It provides the same basic functionality of Billmonk, such as keeping a running total of debts and credits with your friends (only money), but has grown up a little and added some nice data visualization. Buxfer is deeper than Billmonk, letting you track and tag out your expenses with friends and groups over time. The groups option makes it great for managing debts between roommates or within a club. Billmonk is more geared to managing splitting debts between friends and lending out your stuff. Buxfer goes further, letting you analyze you expenses over time through a Google finance-style pie chart with adjustable time frame. Buxfer has gone to great lengths to make importing transactions as easy as possible. They currently support adding transactions to your account via SMS and the ability to import your credit card statements (.csv,.qfx,.ofx). From there you can tag and divide up your expenses as you see fit. What’s great is that these sites start with a simple day-to-day problem that can frustrates us all and present a solution. However, without intimate integration with payment services, it’s still a chore. I’m not so OCD that I will tag and text myself about every payment I make. Wesabe has payment integration, but is also going after the quicken market. Billmonk really benefited from integration with Obopay deal and perhaps Buxfer will find a similar partner. → Read More
In a battle for relevance in the mobile payments space, mobile to mobile payment service Obopay has acquired social payment service Billmonk. Neither are disclosing the size of the acquisition, which is undoubtedly a tiny and probably stock for stock deal. The integration of the two services will first let users settle the debts they tracked on Billmonk instantly over Obopay’s mobile payment platform and eventually by email. You can see Obopay’s release here and Billmonk’s here. Founders Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom will be moving to Obopay’s new Seattle office to focus on solving the “social accounting problem”. This is a crowded space with a single, hugely dominate player, PayPal Mobile. See TextPayMe and KushCash as well. → Read More
Today Helio announced that its subscribers will be able to pay their bills via Obopay. Targeted mostly for pay-as-you-go users, Obopay is the latest in MasterCard’s way of having you spend money on their terms. It works sort-of like a prepaid credit card that you can use to top up minutes, buy crappy wallpapers, and such. But it’s also so much more! Helio says that if you have a phone with Obopay on it, money can be sent to you from anyone. This is a great way to buy your friends who you occasionally talk to a small — gift like a ringtone or video game (NOTE TO MEN: Do not buy your sig other a ringtone). It seems like a decent product and if you visit Obopay’s website, you can get $5 for signing up and an additional $5 for scamming your pals referrals. Helio taps into Obopay [Electronista] → Read More
Update: The Obopay website is now live, although you cannot register and use the service until April. Palo Alto based Obopay is set to launch sometime Thursday (the site is currently password protected). This is the newest product in the very active mobile payments space (see PayPal Mobile and TextPayMe as well). A few more details about Obopay have come out since Matt Marshall posted a teaser two weeks ago. Obopay will rely on a java client on the phone instead of sms or text message payments like PayPal Mobile and TextPayMe. While this provides for a richer and more secure interface, Obopay will be of use only to people who have phones that support java: The first 25 phones that we are porting to cut across 2 of the major carriers (i.e. Cingular and T-Mobile) and one major MVNO that we are in trials with. Five different handset manufacturers are represented in this group (i.e. Nokia, Motorola, Kyocera, Samsung and Sony Ericsson) including the three largest manufacturers. In our porting effort we are targeting all of the handsets that are currently offered by the big 4 carriers that are targeted at our end-user group. The service itself will allow for person to person payments between phones. Obopay says that “users can send money to almost any mobile handset”, which may imply a text message (or email?) for unsupported phones – I just don’t know how that will work yet. Users will also be issued a debit card attached to the account for real world payments, including ATM withdrawls. As to fees, the information I have now is “The transaction costs just pennies”. I’ll update as I receive more information. → Read More
