It’s this particular problem that Payoneer, whose Master Card debit card solution we’ve covered in the past, has made into its house specialty and why it’s become a popular choice for international affiliates.

Need proof? How about $500M in yearly payments going through its systems, and a year-over-year growth rate in the past four years of 100%? No question that Payoneer’s offering has jumped the shark.

Affiliates typically receive their payments by way of wire transfer or check, directly into their local bank accounts, in their own countries. When they buy traffic, however, they usually need to make an international payment.

This moving of money back and forth is costly (fees can be upwards of $30 for wire transfers), and also time consuming (wire transfers take several days to make it to their destination).

With Payoneer, all users are Master Card debit card cardholders. This means that once funds are deposited into their accounts, users can immediately make standard credit card payments, or withdraw cash from ATMs. For affiliates, the real upside is that they can use their cards to pay for traffic they buy **without** the back and forth local-to-international money transfers.

Also, using Payoneer doesn’t require users to have bank accounts, and the cards can be reloaded within hours of funds being deposited in user accounts. And now with the newly launch local bank transfer service, Payoneer can transfer funds in the local currency of the user, as opposed to the currency they were paid in (typically USD). Local currency transfers are both cheaper ($6.95-9.95) and faster than a standard wire transfer. For international users residing in countries where banking systems are still lagging decades behind those of Western countries these are big deals.

The local bank transfer service is going to be gradually released to different countries and partners, so it will take a while to become available all over the globe (although that is decidedly the goal).

Payoneer’s value proposition hasn’t gone unnoticed. The company already has over a thousand partners making payments to hundreds of thousands of users. And with the signing of Direct Track, ~100,000 additional affiliates will be exposed to Payoneer’s solution.

Payonner is backed by Carmel Ventures and Greylock Partners.

The irony is that many get pretty far down the development path before realizing that adding billing infrastructure to their offering may not be as simple as integrating with PayPal’s API or some other payment processor.

Choosing the right processor, and many times, processors, from a confusing multi-layered vendor ecosystem can be tricky. Poor decision-making when it comes to issues such as terms of pricing, business fit, or processing capability, can each be a deep gash in any startup’s soft underbelly.

Payments-R-Us is trying to alleviate the confusion by providing a payments vendor-to-merchant wizard that makes it a snap to choose the right payment processor. The wizard is supplemented with some in-depth content aimed at educating merchants to better grasp the ins and outs of the terms and options offered by vendors so they can better negotiate agreements.

The Payments-R-Us wizard covers four major verticals: traditional US, international, digital goods and high risk. There are currently 15 processing services listed (including several from Amazon, PayPal, and Google Checkout), with about a dozen more in the pipeline. CEO Michael Shatz stresses that most are considered ‘Tier 1′ processors, defined by the fact that they are listed in the top 50 of the annual Nilson Report on top processors.

The wizard is pretty thorough and will walk a merchant through a selection process that includes such options as multi-currency support, affiliate marketing, digital content, eCommerce hosting, alternative payments, as well as adult and gaming.

Payments-R-Us’ business model is a fairly simple one: affiliation. It gets a commission for every merchant it refers to a vendor. Does the fact that Payments-R-Us earns a commission impact its objectivity? I don’t believe so. One of the founders and investors in the company is Yuval Tal, Founder & CEO of Payoneer, which we’ve previously written about (here & here). By all accounts, Tal is considered a stand-up entrepreneur in the Israeli startup community.

Payments-R-Us won’t be a billion dollar business. But it serves a real need and has a clear hook for a business model which I imagine could run revenues up to six-figures per month. Its only challenge will be to situate itself as a key destination for merchants when making their processing vendor selection.

Here is a round-up of the 6 Israeli companies that presented on stage:

Registered Investment Advisors (RIA’s) typically provide advice to individuals with assets of $500K and above on average. The alternative to individuals with less assets are mutual funds which lack in transparencies (what your money is invested in) and individual attention (you get to talk to customer service reps, not the fund manager). Personalria wants to change all this by bringing the same high-end advice and investment transparency “rich folks” get to “ordinary folks” with much fewer assets to invest, say $10K.

The Personalria platform requires buy-in from both users and RIA’s. Users are required to open a brokerage trading account at Ameritrade or eTrade, for example, in order to use the Personalria service. RIA’s will need to create profiles describing their education, experience, etc.

The big question is whether the company can pull off the chicken-and-the-egg challenge, meaning, getting a critical mass of users and RIA’s that make it worthwhile for each group to join. The judges on the panel also noted the challenges the company will face in customer acquisition and the density of competition, both offline and online such as Cake Financial (a company that launched at last year’s TC40).

AlfaBetic has developed a propriety language translation engine based on statistical machine translation and human QA to translate English to Spanish, French, German and Portuguese.

The service is initially being targeted at bloggers which can provide AlfaBetic an RSS feed that will then be translated and consequently monetized globally. Their engine will do most of the work, but human intervention is used to edit and proof every piece of content. The engine employs domain language templates such as technology, sports and finance. These are improved over time through machine learning and as a result of the human QA.

The company’s planned business model requires it to provide the translated content to portals and then the selling of ads against it. This will be “non-intelligent” targeting, i.e. basic demographics, sponsorship, etc.

Panel judges Om Malik & Tim O’Riley were asked whether they would use the service and indicated they would not use a translation model. Instead they would opt for a full-blown localized operation such as fr.techcrunch.com.

The story of Tweegee begins in Israel where the company is active as Tipo.co.il, a kids community site with 800K monthly uniques (out of a total population of 1.2M kids aged 8-14).

TechCrunch50 marks the company’s launch of its American play—Tweegee.com—a social network aimed at being MySpace for kids aged 8-14. Positioned as a destination site, TweeGee is intended to offer tweens a safe environment to express themselves and interact with others in their age group.

The site offers email with a feature called WordUp, a patent pending application which works in a very similar manner to T9, but attuned to the 8-14 age group with relevant blacklisted words and such. Kids can also use a calendar app, build avatars, play multiplayer games and create their Zones which are websites built on Flash and HTML.

One of the big challenges the company will face is an issue panel judge Ron Conway raised and that is how to get gain a share of the time kids are already spending online in places such as ClubPenguin. Curiously, the company is adamant about not widgetizing its offering.

Next week the company will launch a Russian version called Tvidi.ru , the result of a partnership with Russian Media company RBC which paid $6M for 50% of the license. A Turkish version is in the works.

MytTopia wants to reduce the headaches and costs associated with developing games for mobile phones by allowing developers to write code once and have it immediately ported to all available smartphones and mobile operating systems.

The company’s solution—similar to that of Mo’Minis—is a Rich Content Authoring Environment called RUGS which utilizes a customized Eclipse-based IDE. Developers can use this environment to develop any number of mobile game applications without any platform-specific knowledge such as Symbian, PlamOS, or iPhone SDK. The application designer works independently of the programmer to design the app skin & layout—the code remains the same.

MyTopia claims that a single cross-platform game developed on RUGS required one developer four weeks at a cost of $50K, while it would cost $1M using current development methods.

MyTopia is also running a game destination site called MyTopia Online which was considered a distraction by the panel of judges.

Think of devunity’s collaborative coding platform as Google Docs for code. The key pain point it is trying to solve is providing developers the ability to interact with fellow developers in real time, thereby creating a “healthier” development process which would theoretically reduce dev costs.

devunity’s fully functioning code editor currently supports Python, PHP, ASP, Javascripts, CSS, and HTML. It also sports built-in integrated APIs such as BOSS, Google Apps Engine, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, etc. The code is completely exportable, meaning, devunity does not lock you in to having them host the app.

There’s also no need to worry about versioning issues such as waiting for other developers to check-in code—devunity does all of this in real time. It also allows the developers to create discussions right on top of the code and gain additional visibility by way of a mini feed which is automatically created for each project.

The company is aiming for a two pronged business model approach. The first is a service play where developers would pay for usage based on a subscription model. The second is a white label approach where companies can form their own devunity environment. An interesting example for the latter would be to allow an outside development firm to use devunity in order to work and interact along side an in-house dev team.

plaYce believes there’s a gap between high-end and casual games, where the former is expensive and might not give you the bang for your buck you expect, and the latter being free but flat in game graphic quality.

plaYce is attempting to bridge this gap through a propriety graphics rendering technology that requires no-download yet still delivers high graphics quality and fast frame rate, right within the browser. While still restricted to IE—it requires a DirectX plugin—the company claims the technology will be applicable on other browsers and is optimized for low-end computers. It is also able to recreate dense scenarios streamed over slow web connections.

The company has no intent to develop the games itself, rather it sees itself as both platform and publisher. It intends to lure independent game developers by offering them what it calls “Game Infrastructure as a Service” which would include everything from the game infrastructure to user acquisition.

The major challenge for plaYce will be to find 2-3 killer games that will bring the critical mass of users necessary to attract game developers to the platform.

For more information on plaYce, see John Biggs’ post, here.

DemoPit Companies:

Founded by Nir Ofir, a co-founder at BlogTV, iamnews is taking a crowed-sourced approach to the newsroom. Once news tasks are created, reporters from around can contribute into them. This can include pure textual content, photos and videos. The platform handles the entire process, from task creation to management of the contributions. With the newspaper business continuing to struggle, a solution such as iamnews can help them deliver quicker news more cheaply. (Iamnews was voted the best DemoPit company, and became the last TC50 finalist to present onstage).

ConTrust provides a real-time UGC moderation platform able to identify content threats including profanity, pornography, racism and brand abuse. It is then able to block these threats according to a set of pre-defined customized levels. The company also claims their platform protects against traditional security threats such as spam, phishing, and malware.

Joongel considers itself a platform for the creation of web-based toolbars. These are toolbar “strips” in the header area of a web page that require neither download nor installation. Site publishers can use Joongel to offer a search engine aggregator or a vertical search engine for travel, video, cooking, etc. The motivation for publishers is mainly through monetization via affiliation and ad rev-share.

Update: A prominent angel investor walking the TC50 DemoPit has expressed interest in investing in the company.

Exhibitor Companies:

2Pad is a web service that integrates with your email service—currently limited to Windows Live, AOL, Gmail, MobileME and IMAP service providers—in order to mine it for pictures and videos. 2Pad then automatically tags them with the email’s subject, sender, recipient—all of which are then available as filters. The service is very similar to xoopit with the major difference being that 2Pad does not require an installation.

Delver has developed a search engine designed to uncover knowledge and information that exists in users’ social graphs. Delver is packaging themselves as both a destination site and a white label solution for intra social network search.

Payoneer provides a payment solution for web-business that utilizes MasterCard debit cards to facilitate the actual payment at the end point. While similar in concept to PayPal, Payoneer sees itself more of a complement than competition in the sense that it can bring its expertise in international payments into the PayPal ecosystem—an area PayPal is generally considered as lacking.

The company recently closed an $8M Series B round from Greylock and Carmel Ventures.

Wix offers a webtop publishing platform for the creation of Flash-based websites, social network profiles, comments and more. (Disclosure: I advised the company in the past).

Payoneer’s advantage over Paypal in the micro-payments arena is that it makes international payments easier by not requiring a bank account for verification. Websites like iStockPhoto or Metacafe can issue pre-paid Mastercard debit cards to their customers and transfer funds electronically to the credit card account. The account can be used as a regular electronic payment transfer system as well similar to Paypal.

The Israeli startup (whose headquarters are in New York City), will use the new cash to fund expansion into more markets and invest in technologies to detect and prevent fraud and abuse by criminals and terrorists.

If you are going to go after a niche in the payments industry, international payments is about as big a niche as you can get. But it can also be a dangerous game in the post-9/11 world.

The new offering allows Payoneer card holders that live outside the US to receive direct Automated Clearing House (ACH) deposits/payments without the necessity of actually having a US bank account.

Here’s how it works: Payoneer maintains a bulk of sub-accounts under its main account, which is held in an American bank. When an ACH transfer is initiated, each of these sub-accounts is referenced using its own routing and account numbers. When the funds are credited to one of these sub-accounts, Payoneer loads the funds to the associated card.

Contrary to their name, these accounts are not virtual at all. Payoneer’s thinking here is to call them virtual accounts because they only serve as channels for loading money onto their cards. The accounts cannot be used for wire transfers, they don’t bear interest, etc. I may be splitting hairs, but the name could be a bit snazzier.

The Payoneer Virtual US Account might not seem all that exciting to some, but I assure you, this is a huge deal if you are an international payee. Take the following scenario as a case-in-point:

Let’s say you’re an affiliate marketer living in Russia and you’ve just had your monthly commission deposited to your PayPal account. With Payoneer, it works like this now: you can perform an ACH transfer directly from your PayPal account to your Payoneer Virtual US Account. The funds will be immediately available on your Payoneer Debit MasterCard balance, ready for cash withdrawal from an ATM in Moscow, or available for charge at any MasterCard point-of-sale station (department stores, supermarkets, etc.).

Payoneer’s Virtual US Account program is still in pilot mode and only available to a select group of cardholders, for whom Payoneer can accurately verify the source and destination of funds.

While the program is clearly valuable to international payees, things are a bit stickier with the PayPals, LinkShares and iStockPhotos of the world whose “blessing” is necessary for the program to take off. The crux of their concern is a fear of issues related to money laundering compliance. They would prefer to avoid the matter completely rather than risk getting themselves into hot water. Their “blessing” is necessary because they may already (or can easily in the future) update their terms and conditions to stipulate that ACH transfer to payees from certain countries are barred.

The fact that Payoneer’s systems and methodologies are designed to deal head-on with international compliance issues should help it on this front. If Payoneer has been given the green-light to broaden its offering to include Virtual US Accounts, it has probably handled compliance issues to the satisfaction of its bank, which must have kept a particularly close eye on it from day one.

Many, if not most, Internet startups focus on the American market and its users. Often times this leaves international users without the access to products and services that US users find common-place. So it’s good to see a company like Payoneer simplify payments and cash outs for international payees. It might not be easy, but the rewards could be substantial.

Payoneer offers Web-based businesses a method to pay their members/users/partners by way of prepaid debit cards. The fully-functioning debit MasterCards are issued to payees worldwide and can be used online, at points-of-sale, or at ATM’s for cash withdrawals in local currency.

The 800-pound payment service provider is PayPal of course. (PaidByCash is another competitor). However, while PayPal is the top online payment service when it comes to person-to-person transactions, it is far from perfect in other respects, especially when it comes to international payments. For payees residing outside the US, PayPal cannot match the ease and simplicity that Payoneer offers when it comes to receiving their funds.

PayPal requires a bank account to transfer funds internationally. To confirm the bank account, PayPal makes a micro-deposit (a few cents) into the account, and then has the payee report back the exact amount, thereby “proving” account ownership. The problem is that for this process to even take place, the banking institutions in the country where the payee resides must support EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer). Not all countries do. For example, India, China the USSR countries, and some Latin American countries don’t. (Incidentally, this wacky process is why I still don’t have a PayPal account… I’ve gone through it 4-5 times in the past few years… The micro-deposit doesn’t register in my account immediately and by the time I remember it, I’ve already made the purchase in some other manner).

On Payoneer, account verification—a PayPal staple—is a non-issue. Anyone worldwide over 13 can get a card and get paid. Cards require one-time shipping and are then loaded and re-loaded electronically by Payoneer. Convenience-wise, the hassles and high fees normally associated with Wire Transfer and Check payments are greatly reduced or, when a bank is involved in the process, averted completely.

Other than the expected back-office goodies, Payoneer offers its business customers a branding and retention tool in the form of a co-branded MasterCard (see examples right).

Payoneer is also announcing the addition of iStockphoto to its client roster. By the end of the year, iStock will begin offering Payoneer as a payment method to its 35,000 contributing artists who earn royalties on the sale of their images and videos. Among Payoneer’s 70 clients are oDesk, MetaCafe, Amie Street and Plimus.

Founded in 2005, Payoneer employs 25 and is headquartered in New York with R&D in Tel-Aviv, Israel. A $2M seed round was raised from Payoneer’s CEO himself, Yuval Tal and private investors including Zohar Gilon, Charlie Federman, Michael Loeb and Ilan Kaufthal. Greylock (Israel) added a total of $4M in Series A this year, with Moshe Mor the partner attached to the deal.