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.

From $1.40/User to the Moon!!!

"Alright, what the heck is he talking about now...?"

Mashable took a look at the quarterly SEC filing of SNAP Interactive, which operates the "Are You Interested" and "Meet New People" facebook application that boast 5.2 million and 335,000 members respectively. From this, and the company's market capitalization, they back out $1.40/user based on the following insights:

"As deals become more common in the Facebook application space, the question becomes how much is a user worth? As a publicly traded company, SNAP is sporting a market value of around $10 million. At its current pace, the company looks to pull in $1.5-$2 million in revenue this year, meaning its price-to-sales ratio is 5:1. If you assume a 5x price-to-sales ratio, that would mean each one of SNAP’s users is actually worth around $1.40 (each user pulls in $0.28/yr, if the company is valued at 5x sales, you arrive a $1.40 per user valuation)."
Interestingly, neither applications, nor Frengo, which we'll discuss in a moment, show up on Comscore's ranking of widget adoption.

Facebook Application	Engaged Widget Viewers (000)	Penetration of Total U.S. Facebook Audience
Total Facebook.com Visitors	33,660	100.0%
Total Facebook Applications	20,649	61.3%
Top Friends (Slide)	6,230	18.5%
Movies (Flixster)	5,199	15.4%
SuperPoke!(Slide)	3,626	10.8%
Compare People	3,503	10.4%
iLike	3,449	10.2%
Super Wall (RockYou!)	3,237	9.6%
Likeness (RockYou!)	2,693	8.0%
Quizzes	2,583	7.7%
FunWall (Slide)	2,107	6.3%
Graffiti	1,647	4.9%

Second Wave of Facebook Apps

Venture Beat reported on Frengo yesterday as part of the "Second Wave" of Facebook applications centered around companies actually attempting to make money. Frengo has 3.2 million users and gets 12-15 million daily page views. The application is a social dating site and allows users to get new hits directly to their mobile phone as well with the option of charging $5.95 to their cell phone bill to receive more recommendations and new friends. Certainly, the web's modus operandi is to first gather users and then to attempt to monetize them, and the widget trend is no exception to this. Companies like Adonomics are also attempting to put out metrics of usage as well as attempt to quantify the cash value of each of the applications.

Mpayy Secure Payments Widget on its Way

Mpayy's secure payments widget is on its way as has been discussed here. The widget will work with any of the Personal accounts that enable free Person-to-Person money transfers or its Mobile Merchant Accounts that empower direct salespeople from eBay to Mary Kay to Avon ladies with a secure electronic payments system directly from their mobile phones. Mpayy's widget is still in testing, but will be syndicated across facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, iGoogle, and others as seen here.



Mpayy continues to look for charities, political campaigns, and non-profits for whom we will process donations for free. Talks continue, but interested parties can feel free to contact me directly.