Blue Steel & Other New Mpayyment Widget Skins

Lipstick on a Lamborghini

One of the things I planned to do when I started this blog was to document the empirical record of birthing and nurturing a startup. I've neglected it because at the end of the day, it's difficult to broadcast to the Internet's permanent record many things along the continuum from a lapse of concentration to tactical errors. Many times, one can become naturally reluctant to call attention to decisions and actions you've taken that materially improve the situation.



One thing that I am really enjoying is the depth of the hands-on education that becomes a necessity. I've alluded many times to the painful status of our front-end. It's like we've put a cover on the car the makes our underlying Lamborghini payment application has the shape and power of a Saturn coup. We'll be lifting the veil with a much more exciting front-end in the next few weeks that I think people will understand and enjoy. Matt Shea joined us about 5 weeks ago, and we will make the most of his skill set.

For my part, though, I have finally had the time to study and learn some basic web development skills with specific tasks that go into production. I've been working with websites since August, 2001, though I had to learn through work in connection with developers. My Poli Sci/Econ undergrad did nothing to prep me, and I started to get a grasp because I had a PHP developer and Oracle DBA who vituperatively despised one another. Through Zacks and Orbitz I became adept at writing Requirements documents, shepherding projects through design and development, and testing and maintaining the bug lists for a number of sites. As my career went on, I've dealt with sites at increasing levels of sophistication and transaction numbers, our present front-end notwithstanding.

The first full site pages I've ever created are the new micro-site for the...

Secure Payment Widget

Mpayy re-launched our Secure Payment Widget last Saturday with a new skin -- "Blue Steel" created by Matt Shea. We added some DHTML popups to help people through the system. Additional improvements to the widget were the ability to specify a new skin. We've created three initial skins in the forms of an iPhone, a Chocolate, and a kind of sad Blackberry. Mpayy's mobile payment processing system is now available as a phone skin on your blog or favorite social network.

(The widget micro-site denoted by the black buttons is a Trace Johnson original. Compliments and invectives are equally encouraged.)

The other exciting new piece of functionality we added to the widget was the ability to co-brand it with your own logo. This was necessary first to comply with MySpace application Terms of Service which stipulate that any payment applications must make perfectly clear that the application is unaffiliated with MySpace and Fox Interactive Media.



We went ahead and customized a bunch for fraternities and sororities @ our Gone Greek page also within the microsite.

Widget Commerce Tool

I was annoyed today when I saw a Payments News story on a UK company with a new Facebook widget to send money to friends, though they charge the sender 1% up to 0.50 euros. Mpayy is set to empower charitable donations, digital music & online auction sales directly through any social networking page. Mpayy's Mobile Merchant account is just $0.20 + 2.00%, less than PayPal, and more secure than most other online money transfer services being hosted within US Bank's data centers.

Internet Impotent in Music-Buying Decisions?

Last month, I discussed the troubles companies have driving revenues through online music services. Sonific had shut down and Snocap was sold to Imeem for what was rumored to be fire-sale prices. On Friday, the Pew Center for Internet Research provided some data that may explain some of the trouble these folks are having.

The Pew report cites an ABC news story pointing to the crux of the problem:

"Shipments of CDs peaked at 942.5 million units in 2000 and fell by 25% to 705 million units in 2005. Figures released earlier this year show that album sales fell by 9.5% in 2007, even though digital sales grew by 45% in this period." (
Alex Veiga, U.S. Album Sales Down, Digital Up. Associated Press, January 8, 2008. Available online at: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=4081901. Accessed on May 8, 2008.



Among internet users who research the music they buy online, their methods are varied (picture left), but only 32% of those who said they used music said their online research was definitive in making their purchasing decision. In order, the top 5 effects of online music research were:

1. Learn more about the band
2. Learn about new artists
3. Save money on music purchases
4. Buy more music than was planned
5. Changed their mind about the artist or song they were going to purchase.

By and large, it is offline influences that continue to drive the music purchasing decision according to the survey data.



Now, the 70+% of users who say that friends and family are impactful in driving their music purchases could certainly include folks interacting on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. Applications such as iLike on Facebook that allows friends to dedicate songs to others can be source of new music.

Activities for online music research are also varied, and certainly skewed towards the younger generation. The Pew Center caveats this report with the fact that litigation fears may drive many people to not respond in the positive to the question of whether or not they download music.



Given the large concentration of offline influences and purchases, it becomes more understandable why a fragmented strategy towards digital content sales may not drive the fortunes of many companies and the benefits continue to be concentrated in the likes of iTunes and Amazon. However, Apple's recent success in surpassing WalMart in music sales is evidence that more sales may move to digital. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how the content vs. free advertising-supported listening shakes out. It's not likely to resolve itself in the same timeframe as BluRay vs. HD DVD.

Atomized vs. Aggregated - Social Networking Value Search Continues

Membership has its Privileges

Given my career in ecommerce and marketing, I probably have among the highest click-through rates of online ads. A click from the Drudge Report sent me to American Express' Travel social network that provides interaction between Members and their privileges. American Express has long cultivated a brand identity of exclusivity vs. Visa's brand identity of universality.

At its core, MembersKnow is a 3 parts premium restaurant listing, 1 part recommendation engine. A search of "Where are Other CardMembers Dining?" yields:



Digging into the "Conversations" reveals something a bit more like Yelp, except far less well-organized:



It makes me wonder whether AMEX had a conversation like this one in The Office:



The added value to American Express' members of the social network is not immediately apparent given i) the limited user-generated content and ii) the apparent lack of a direct role of AMEX in creating value for users of the social network. What does it say about the possibility for niche social networking?

Social Portability & Niche/Vertical Social Networks

Google this week confirmed the Google FriendFeed that is its initial foray into leveraging the Open Social Consortium to add social networking features to any website. Google's Innovation Machine has created an unreal number of tools that people can grab to enhance their sites including most significantly, in my opinion, Google Analytics.

Google is leveraging user id's and activities on social networking sites Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo IDs in a manner similar to FriendFeed's use of Flickr, MySpace, Twittr and Yelp. These tools bring the richness of user interaction from open and aggregated social networks to any website that wants to add a touch of social interaction to their site. Effectively leveraging these data stores will ultimately improve targeting of advertising and possibly website features. It also could push to the side services like AMEX's social network. Why would I want to spend time creating content for a single site when I could make it more portable and bring it along with me? If a review/networking site wants to remain viable, will they need to integrate to the Open Social API? Would TripAdvisor benefit from leveraging the information I provided to Yelp? Probably. Will there be a trade-off? It remains to be seen.

Further, what of sites like Ning and Wetpaint? These sites create platforms for the most discrete social networks to exist, but the aggregation allows them to extract advertising revenues from the combined traffic, as well as creating more extensive targeting abilities to specific groups. Would they not benefit further if they could know what I was doing on my facebook Causes application right before I came to my Underwater Basket Weaving group on their sites?

The question of how to extract monetary value from social networking sites remains, but in the meantime, every social network will need to decide what impact the meta-identity tools will have on their existing networks.

What Value Widgets?

ReadWrite Web continues to questions the ability of facebook to monetize its platform. The general potential of facebook and other social networks is an issue I've blogged about here and here. It has not stopped the venture community from continuing to pour money in, including a $20 million investment in meebo at a $200 million valuation most recently.

RWW notes that most of the successful facebook applications are strictly fun ways to communicate with your friends - I totally just superPoked your demon. Applications that actually have utility tend to not have the viral component that many of these applications which just reach out and touch/invite facebook friends. Further, it remains difficult to engage users while on facebook. Further, for applications that are related to one's personal activities - calendars, reminders, blog readers - it is strains reason to assume that people will bother their friends with invitations.

None of this has stopped folks like Adonomics from continuing to espouse the limitless earning potential of facebook applications. According to a February blog post everything on the web will be remade for facebook which will create a marketplace and incomes for developers of facebook applications along the lines of eBay for Power Sellers. However, to date, the income from the widgets has come only through advertising with networks like Gigya and WidgetBucks.

These networks may extract the ad rents from facebook, assuming they can produce more success than ads on the network itself. My personal experiment with ~15 different ads failed to yield a click-through rate above 0.04%, at which point the company stops serving your ad until you increase the Cost-per-Click bid to something in the Google levels - read $1.50. The site does have the ability to deliver impressions, but the value of that given its users' unwillingness to engage calls into question its ability to drive value. (Companies can use larger images, but to do so, you need a $50,000 guaranteed budget, and who knows whether that is on an impression or click basis.

Online ads certainly continue to garner more of the discretionary funds of large advertisers. The battle for the clicks that make these ads useful will continue to go on between the multiple players providing each piece of a web page.

Widget Payments

Mpayy continues to offer its secure payments services through a syndicated widget that can also be found on facebook. Mpayy will relaunch its widget with configurable logos, skins and payment fields on May 18th. Stay tuned.