Self-Review EOW 1

Ladies & Gentlemen, We Have a Website

For the dozens of loyal readers of this website, I apologize for the lack of communication this week. http://www.mpayy.com and http://mobile.mpayy.com are now live.

The final week saw some interesting road bumps. If you look at the website of the new payments standard, you'll see the Verisign SSL certificates. Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, Verisign does its due diligence to validate that the websites that bear its emblem are serious companies.

The domain registry we used created a separate account with a company that holds our information private, preventing the SSL verification team at Verisign from seeing who we were. Since Mpayy was originally Magellan Payments, a company created to hold the Intellectual Property that underlies our patent pending payments system, the privacy account was linked to an email at Magellan Payments.

The fix took a few hours, but is now resolved, and the details of our registration can be seen here.

Mobile Merriment

Mpayy, Inc. launched with a full suite of payment capabilities. Mpayy now enables its Personal Account members to send money to anyone for free through Mpayy.com, mobile.Mpayy.com, as well as the many internet retailers we are in the process of signing up. Soon, we will enable a secure online widget syndicated across the many sites that can be personalized as discussed here.

Mpayy's mobile site is very slick, and initial reports from mobile website authority Ready.mobi point to not a bad first attempt. However, there is still a great deal of work to do.




Mpayy's fantastic development team at US Bank is working to release within the next few days a fix for some redirecting issues we're having. Even with a thin-client solution in which users do not have to download anything to their phones and with a solution that does not require coordination with the wireless service providers, one still has to work to test on every phone out there on the market. Beyond this short-term fix, Mpayy is committed, and well on its way, to migrating more functionality from the website to the mobile site, and continue to improve the user experience of each.

Charitable Commerce

Mpayy also continues to seek charities, non-profit organizations, and political campaigns for whom we will process donations with no cost. Mpayy's secure, commercial grade payment processing system is the perfect solution for such organizations who place a premium on security. Further, we will provide contributors with a detailed receipt that would be usable for tax receipts and personal records.

Making the Grade

Placing a premium on quality, Mpayy did add a few days to its launch
date to test its Disaster Recovery, and make adjustments to our platform
to extend the full set of functionality and security to some late model
cell phones that are still out in circulation. We expect to cover 99% of
the devices on this launch. The site is up with modest issues. All features are fully functional and secure. There are a number of small items we're dealing with in addition to our on-going efforts to ensure that Mpayy's mobile site experience is smooth on all phones on the market as well as to get our widget out the door.

All in all, we give ourselves a B-, but look forward to continual improvement.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at tjohnson@mpayy.com.

Margin-Starved Retailers to Need More

The Federal Reserve put out its "Beige Book" for the January 29-30 Fed meeting in which it pointed to slowing economic growth, though it showed no sign that a recession was already in effect. However, economists, the Bush Administration, and industry leaders/watchers perceive that recession has already taken hold. Those sentiments are the impetus for the $180 billion fiscal stimulus bill being proposed to give Americans an $800 tax rebate.

Boosting this scenario is a recent CBO report that argued, "So to boost the economy by about a percentage point for half a year, the stimulus would have to be about a percentage point of a half-year's gross domestic product, or about $70 billion," according to a a CBS Marketwatch report. Multiply that 2x to get to the $140 billion the Bush Administration is advocating in an attempt that is likely seeking 1% GDP boost, or at least to buttress the retail market. The same CBO report revealed that consumers spent 20-40% of their tax rebates on retail, which is where the growth comes from. The stimulus is likely to sail through (you heard it here first) because no one runs away from giving money to the electorate in an election year.

However, retail deserves a closer look...

While online retail growth was almost 20% over the holiday season as discussed here, overall retail growth was a disappointment over the same period. Retail sales did grow year over year, although it came in at 3% instead of 4%.

Wal Mart announced earlier this year that it would slow the rate of new store openings in spite of their better than expected growth. Some analysts argue that the company's success is a contrarian indicator as many consumers traded down to bargain basement Wal Mart.

The Wall Street Journal notes some recent hard times among

"Zale Corp. said it would close 60 stores in the next 90 days. Talbots plans to pare store openings and use more frequent markdowns to entice shoppers. Chico's FAS Inc., another clothing retailer, is cutting $100 million of capital spending, including scaling back a distribution center expansion and delaying a new computer project until 2009."

Retail has been surging the last several years possibly started by the tax cuts several years ago, but certainly driven forward by skyrocketing home prices, and falling interest rates. Home-owners were able to continually refinance their homes at lower rates, taking out equity in the process, which they tended to pour back into the retail economy. Home prices have stalled in many places and begun falling precipitously elsewhere in the country. It is questionable how much tax rebates will be able to pull consumers out of the hole, especially in light of the buying binge they've been on and the negative savings rate Americans have presently.

A Win for Mpayy

Mpayy, Inc., which launches in less than 48 hours will provide a solution to many of the problems facing the retail industry. As sales decline, this margin-starved industry will be groping for a few percentage points here and there. One place they can find that is by CUTTING TRANSACTION COSTS, through Mpayy, which will also get them out of the pretty pickle JC Penny currently finds itself in with the recent revelation of 650,000 lost identities.

Torrents of Green Flowing to Green Tech

Before I get to my observations on the money flowing into Green technology, forgive me a moment of shameless self promotion...

Mpayy is less than two weeks away from launching to create the new payments standard. The product enters User Acceptance Testing on January 9th, and will deliver the best value to consumers and merchants alike with 1% Cash Back on all purchases over $50 and a single low rate for secure payment processing and 0% fraud liability for merchants.

On January 2nd, I posted here about a recent National Venture Capital Association survey for 2008 venture capital investing along with some spiffy charts, but I realized I did not link to the survey data, which is here. One interesting trend from that survey is the...

Torrential Money Flows into Green Tech

I posted this image from the survey, but failed to note the top of the chart. Fully 79.5% of those in the know predict that Clean Technology investments will grow.



To their credit, those folks know their industry well enough to predict that green technology will be the most overvalued sector in 2008.



This is not terribly surprising. Unlike Internet and software companies, which can be started with a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars (Peter Thiel just return 50X his investment on facebook in just a few years), green technology is a massively capital intensive industry in which tens of millions of dollars can be spent PROVING a new methodology, let alone commercializing it. Even companies with proven sources of alternative fuels will require massive capital expenditures on the part of gas stations, electricity companies, etc. to deliver those sources to consumers.

What Next With Coal???

Last weekend, I had brunch with Andrew Perlman, President and CEO of GreatPoint Energy, who is an exciting and successful repeat entrepreneur. His company is in the process of commercializing its patent-pending BlueGas product that will turn coal into natural gas. With oil at $100/barrel, and gasoline over $3 across the country, Perlman et al are working to make clean use of coal, a commodity that is in abundance in the United States.



GreatPoint secured $100 million in funding from a syndicated group led by Kleiner Perkins in the 4th quarter. Their only competitor is a public-private partnership called FutureGen.



At the very least, it will be an interesting case study in the efficiency and success of private enterprise vs. federal innovation.

However, this market raises the question of what happens for companies like Freight Pipeline, which secured $1 million in funding today to create "Green Bricks" from coal's by products or BlueGas competitor EnerTech, which secured $46 million today to use human byproduct, or "slurry" to produce energy.

Watching the VC headlines for clean tech will be interesting to watch not just over the next year, but the next ten as the global economy determines what solutions to adopt to reduce the human environmental footprint. For Mpayy, we'll continue to stand on the sidelines as we hopefully close our $2 million round in the next few weeks to deliver the new payments standard.