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.