Join the Fight Against Lupus

Mpayy has officially joined the fight against Lupus with the Alliance for Lupus Research. Together, Mpayy and the ALR are working to leverage Facebook traffic to fight against Lupus. See the ALR's donation widget at http://apps.facebook.com/curelupus.

Mpayy will match each new donation account with a $1 donation to the ALR.

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.

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.

Announcing Mpayy Secure Payments Widget & Bracket Challenge!

It's 3:40 AM on Sunday morning, but I'm giddy as a school-boy and felt it important to announce the exciting new functionality we've just completed launching.

Secure Payments Widget is Here!

I've forecast the Mpayy Secure Payments Widget a number of times in this space, but finally it is in production and ready for all to use.



(Here it is, though the blog post CSS is changing the color of the background in this post.)

Mpayy is utilizing the Clearspring Launchpad Widget syndication platform in order to make it one-click to the addition of the widget anywhere our Members wish to use it.

The Development and Product teams at Mpayy and US Bank discussed Widget security extensively. The question of, "Why did PayPal redirect the payment piece to their own website" with the subtext of, "clearly these guys know a whole lot about security." The concern about "spoofing" is very real. Clearspring makes it incredibly easy to grab some part of a website as a Widget, and it would be simple to take the front end from PayPal, Causes, or others and change the Widget file to use JavaScript that posts sensitive User Names and Passwords to another source. The criminal could then use the User Names and Passwords on the real site to steal money.

As a result, we decided to pop up a small version of the website so users can verify our SSL certificates and see the URL and iconic Padlock to demonstrate the security of the page. Only then do we request Password. I spoke with Joel Pulliam, VP Product at Clearspring about providing a Verisign-esque service to validate the source of the Widget, but they declined to do so due to concerns about spoofing the certification. If you look at NOCA's One-Click Pay literally asks you to put your Bank Routing Number and Account Number into a facebook page. Caveat emptor, pal.

Mpayy's widget can be used by any of its Members, and provides a simple and easy way for Online Sellers and Charities to add the payments widget to any page they wish with limited technical prowess. On 3/16, we will make it server driven so Members can pre-populate Payee, which will be more helpful. Mpayy will process payments for non-profits and charities for free, and hopes to see it employed very frequently with large charities.

Get Paid w/ Mpayy - Mpayy Bracket Challenge

Mpayy announces the (up to) $25,000 "Mpayy Bracket Challenge" for all Personal and Mobile Merchant account-holders.



Our good friends at PoolTracker have a wonderful White Label system that allows us to customize with our own header. Sign up now, and submit your bracket before the tournament starts on March 20th.



The payouts to the Bracket Challenge can be found here. We will obviously pay users into their Mpayy accounts where they can withdraw it directly to a Linked Bank account or send to someone, and soon to shop online.

Other New Items

Three other notable items:

• Free Donation Processing - Mpayy will process donations for free for Charities, Non-Profits, and political campaigns. Zero transaction fees will be taken through any of the Mpayy Channels - online, mobile, social networking
• In-Line Validation - We added local JavaScript in-line validation to the Personal Information page of each account. We require a number of fields for the identity check, and when we launched, we had some unfriendly validation rules around Mobile Phone number, email address and Date of Birth. Those have hopefully been ameliorated.
• Person-to-Person Text Notification - We originally did not send an immediate text message notification for Person-to-Person transactions, but determined it was a necessity to communicate immediately the action taken when paying a friend for dinner, quick loans or other expenditures, especially in the world where folks are paying each other through our mobile site.

Many Praises for US Bank

At my last job, subsequent builds made me feel as if we were getting worse at our jobs. In days subsequent to builds products, or the whole site was dusted for hours and days on end. This build went off without a hitch, with just about 45 minute delay. Our partners at US Bank (NYSE: USB) have an incredible amount of experience in developing software generally, and enterprise payment & mobile applications specifically. We remark regularly that in many ways we are a non-startup startup. We mean this in the fact that US Bank is an incredible Partner to have, and from day 1, we piggy-backed on world class security, operations and development assets.

More to come, now SIGN UP, it's FREE!