PayNearMe, an alternative payments product from the company formerly known as Kwedit, has just raised $16 million in funding led by Khosla Ventures, with new investor August Capital and current investors True Ventures and Maveron also participating in the round. This brings the company’s total funding to $23.3 million. In conjunction with the funding announcement, Mark Britto, CEO of BOKU will join the company’s board of directors.
PayNearMe is capitalizing on the wave of services that are emerging for the unbanked, a group that includes 60 million individuals in the U.S. The “unbanked” refers to consumers who don’t have traditional bank accounts or cannot qualify for credit cards. PayNearMe allows people who don’t have or don’t want to use credit or debit cards to purchase products with cash at more than 6,000 7-Eleven stores in the continental U.S. → Read More
The company that launched the Kwedit alternative payment product earlier this year, to much controversy, is testing a new feature that lets users purchase Facebook Credits with cash.
The new product, called PayNearMe, allows people who don’t have or don’t want to use credit or debit cards to purchase Facebook credits with cash at nearly all of the 6,000 7-11 stores in the continental U.S. And it’s a heck of a deal. → Read More
Kwedit is one of the more promising alternate payment methods for social gaming and other virtual good sellers online. If you don’t have a credit card and don’t want to get into the offers/scamville stuff, you don’t have a lot of options. Kwedit allows you to make a promise to pay later – by dropping by a 7-11 and paying cash, or just mailing cash in. If you don’t pay the money back there’s no enforcement against you other than being kicked out of the system.
It first launched in February – see our post describing it as the “first completely unreliable payment network.”
At launch time the company told me they had absolutely no idea what percentage of people would pay back Kwedit promises because they hadn’t tested the product yet. Since virtual goods are free to create and sell, though, there wasn’t much downside for the seller. The only problem would be around cannibalism where a user chooses Kwedit instead of paying directly even though they have a credit card. → Read More
Kwedit, the innovative and suddenly controversial payments platform for virtual goods, is releasing some early data.
The service lets users promise to pay later in lieu of a direct credit card payment when they want virtual currency for social games like Farmville. It’s not a legally binding promise, but users have an incentive to pay amounts owed because that allows them to get more virtual currency through the service. Users can pay by, among other methods, mailing in cash or paying at a 7-11.
When the product first launched they had no idea what percentage of promises would be repaid. Anything at all is incremental revenue to game publishers, and since the stuff they’re selling has no marginal cost (virtual currency), it’s all upside. But after nearly two months of being live, they say the repayment rate is 25.9% If you’re a credit company that would put you out of business. → Read More
Kwedit, the innovative new alternate payment product for social games and just about any other virtual good, is on a roll. They’ve raised a second round of financing – $3.3 million in a round led by Maveron. And they were also on the Colbert Report last night. Just, not so much in a good way.
Colbert ridiculed the company as a “website that hooks little kids on borrowing credit.” You can watch the clip here.
One of Kwedit’s products is a sort of credit system. Users promise to pay back the Kwedit, and social game gives in game currency based on that promise. There’s no enforcement mechanism if the user doesn’t pay, other than a lower Kwedit score and difficulty in getting more in game Kwedit. See our overview here. → Read More
Something tells me Kwedit, which launches today, is going to be a hit. It’s a new payment service that absolutely doesn’t guarantee payments. In fact, its unreliability is what makes it so attractive to social game publishers and other people selling virtual goods. It’s also a great way to let the unbanked masses out there pay for stuff without getting sucked in to scamville-type scams. The product is called Kwedit Promise.
Here’s how Kwedit works: they let users take on fake debt instead of paying for virtual goods with real money (or via scammy or legitimate offers). A user promises to pay later. It’s not an enforceable promise, and there is really no consequence if a user doesn’t pay. But there are built in incentives to pay it off, and Kwedit expects some percentage of people to actually do so.
As users take and pay off, or default, on Kwedit promises, a virtual Kwedit score moves up and down just like a real-life credit score.
Users get more credit (err, Kwedit) when they actually pay the stuff they agreed to. And if they don’t pay, the kwedit score goes down and getting more Kwedit becomes difficult. There’s some risk that users will try to sign up under another name to start fresh – but since most of the virtual games are on social networks and tied to established identities, that won’t work very well. → Read More
