This could be killer if it lets you do person-to-person money transfers like PayPal. If my buddy can pay me back for the movie tickets I bought him earlier with his iPhone and have it go straight to my bank account, I would definitely use it. Obviously there are security and other barriers to overcome but it's not an impossible problem. You don't really need the hardware for this type of thing though.
You are going to carry around an acorn like device for your iphone so you can swipe your buddy's credit card after you lend him money? And if he has his credit card why wouldn't he just pay for his tickets using the card?
I don't think this product is targeted at peer to peer money transfers for individuals. It's for businesses who want to charge customers. The pizza delivery guy or the taxi driver who, today, copies down your credit card number or "calls it in" for example.
I only use my credit card as a payment method. Most online shops don't accept anything but credit card, and sometimes I just don't have enough cash with me and don't want to bother walking to the closest ATM.
Credit cards allow you to loan money but I think that's ridiculous. I don't want to have a debt every time I buy something, I just want to pay immediately, with the money I already have, not with money that I don't have.
Nothing bad about the Twitter Inventor, but there was (A LOT) of luck involved in the success of Twitter. His next project might be interesting, but it is 99.999% certainly not a new blockbuster like Twitter.
Before Twitter came along, I would regularly change my IM status to a nice quote, a link to a nice news story or a link to a cool website. Many people do this. Twitter makes it easy to broadcast something like this to hundreds of people, makes it all searchable and encourages conversation. It serves as an outlet for random thoughts and observations that are too insignificant to fit into a blog post. A "stream of consciousness", if you will. Collectively, Twitter is the entire Internet's stream of consciousness.
I find Twitter is a great way for staying in touch, too. Why? Because it simple. Very, very simple.
but there was (A LOT) of luck involved in the success of Twitter.
Actually there wasn't a lot of luck. Twitter is something that users actually wanted: a broadcast "status" update that wasn't just on their instant message client.
Twitter is successful because they remained positive and persevered while other people capable of making a similar system didn't do anything about it. Grumpy programmers just posted confused blog posts and forum comments about it. "Twitter? Huh? I don't get it." Nobody really tried to compete with them head on, and they still don't have any real competition. People say facebook is their main competition, and they are right, but Facebook has so much baggage of being something else that isn't Twitter that it seems unlikely people will ever consciously choose between one or the other. More likely people will use both services.
It's a bit of luck that anyone cares about posting their status online but it's not really luck that they are using Twitter to do so... What else would they use?
It's easy to pick reasons in after the fact to explain why something happened the way it did. Just being able to find plausible reasons doesn't mean they are right, or that the event wasn't in fact a matter of luck.
IIRC, Twitter was started as a way to send personal bits of info to people you knew. Why else do they have the tagline "What are you doing?".
That idea didn't work. Hence I would definitely agree that a lot of luck resulted in Twitter being repurposed as an broadcaster of impersonal information to people who you don't know. (which is pretty much the opposite of the original intent).
>> "but there was (A LOT) of luck involved in the success of Twitter."
I'm not sure we can even call it a success yet. It's certainly getting popular, but in terms of ROI? Well, we'll have to wait and see if it generates any revenue.
Making something people want is great, but it's only half the battle. You have to be able to translate that into something they want that you can make money from. Twitter hasn't shown they have any clue how to do that yet.
I don't know about those odds... It took an insight most people didn't have to come up with Twitter--to me the concept of twitter was not obvious at all until after I'd used it.
There are no guarantees, but one startling insight could indicate he has more. Plus, I like this idea...
i dont see luck being the determining factor for twitter success but yes you also need a bit of fucking luck in start ups although you would call it more like risk taking and Timing. Other than that just get over it.
Sans-hardware (not supported until 3.0), there are a lot of apps for the iPhone that do credit card processing, including the one that's on Apple TV ad right now: http://innerfence.com
As someone who has spent countless hours looking for a good wireless point of sale system this is going to be huge.
Small retailers will snap this up and avoid the evil merchant companies. All of the inventory management and reporting lives in the cloud. Right now, besides opentable, all of the POS stuff is either really expensive or garbage.
The only comparable thing right now is a Symbol MC70 with Windows Mobile and an external swiper. Apple retail uses them and they are $3k+ a pop. You can get some knock of Pidion 1300s for $1200. All the software is "enterprise" garbage.
This device will be given away at cost. Pair it with an ipod touch and small business climb on board in mass. A whole new slew of small business, babysitters, and freelancers will accept credit cards.
They cleanup in merchant fees at the very least, and quite possibly create the holy grail of mobile-to-mobile payments -- all nicely integrated into twitter.
Most freelancers I work with (granted: high tech folks, generally) already do. Paypal, how I love you, let me count the ways...
Speaking of which: if you want to be extra special nice to your favorite freelancer, pay them through Paypal's batch interface. It reduces the cost to receive the money from essentially 2.9% of the transaction to a flat fee of $1. When you're settling up $2000 invoices, that means a significant amount of money in their pocket rather than Paypal's. All it takes is for you to write a one-line text file and click a button on Paypal.
I actually just spent a fair amount of time researching iPhone credit card processing for a client.
Innerfence's product is definitely the best of the bunch. However, all of the card processing apps on the app store , including Innerfence's, just talk to the Authorize.net payment system. Another one also supports paypal in addition to authorize.net.
As someone who has built both iPhone apps and built apps which use authorize.net for payment processing, I'll say that this isn't trivial, but it certainly isn't a huge challenge if you know what you are doing.
Thus, I can't help but think there must be something else to Dorsey's idea.
I have to imagine that Dorsey knows this which makes me wonder if he has something up his sleeve, unless he thinks that his reputation in the business will help carry the project. This is, after all, the tech industry; we shouldn't underestimate the viral.
Wasn't this the original idea behind Paypal? Wireless money transfer via PDAs?
I remember reading that it was an idea ahead of its time due to the lack of spread of mobile computing. Now that phones are getting smarter, maybe it has a better chance.
