Tag Archives: payments

Introducing My Latest Project: Coinme, WA State’s First Bitcoin ATM

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coinme logoI’m excited to announce the launch of a new company and project, Coinme.

In addition to forming a new company around the cryptocurrency industry, we just launched the state of Washington’s first Bitcoin Kiosk, or better known as an ATM, on Thursday at a downtown Bar and Grill called Spitfire.  These machines provide a quick access portal to buying and selling the popular cryptocurrency and allow users to to turn their cash into bitcoin, or vise versa.  It simply is the fastest and most secure way to buy and sell bitcoin in the world.

Also notable, we are the nation’s first Licensed Bitcoin Kiosk, meaning the State of Washington and the Department of Financial Institutions has declared our business lawful to operate as a money transmitter within the state of Washington.

I will expand on my thoughts about the new emerging cryptocurrency industry and why I am choosing to dive into it in the near future.  Stay tuned!

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Below are a few media articles and more from our press release:

Meet your Bitcoin ATM: Digital currency craze hits Seattle, with help from startup vets

Seattle Welcomes Its First Bitcoin ATM Kiosk at Coinme Launch Party

 

Seattle Technology Executives Launch First Bitcoin Kiosk in the Pacific Northwest

The Coinme Kiosk will be the first licensed bitcoin kiosk in the United States

SEATTLE, Wash. – May 1, 2014, Seattle-area residents will now have a way to conduct fast and secure bitcoin transactions via the Coinme Kiosk. Built by world-leading kiosk manufacturer Robocoin, first-time bitcoin users or avid enthusiasts will now be will be able to buy and sell bitcoin as securely as using a standard ATM.

The launch of the Coinme Kiosk comes months after working closely with state and federal regulators to ensure compliance with existing money transmitter laws, anti-money laundering protocols and KYC (“know your customer”) requirements. As a result, Coinme is the first licensed Bitcoin Kiosk in the United States and complies with state money transmitter laws.

To celebrate this bitcoin milestone, the Seattle community is invited to see a demo of the first Coinme Kiosk and hear a panel of industry experts discuss the potential of cryptocurrency at the company’s launch event beginning at 5:00 p.m., May 1, Spitfire 2219 4th Ave, Seattle, WA.

“Coinme was created out of the frustration local technology executives had with the current state of the Bitcoin market,” said Nick Hughes, General Manager of Coinme. “In order to reach its full potential, the cryptocurrency industry needs more accountability and consumer protection. The market also needs more leaders who are offering education and community outreach,” he said. “Coinme was founded with the goal of bringing all of those factors together. The kiosk is just the start.”

In the coming months, Coinme will roll out additional kiosks in the Seattle metropolitan area. To use the kiosk, users will only need their cell phone and driver’s license. Transactions generally last 5-10 minutes and the funds settle almost immediately; whereas, transactions through online exchanges can take several days. Check the company website for more information and join the newly formed Seattle Bitcoin Meetup for upcoming social events and educational programs.

“At Coinme, we’re a team who believes the digital currency industry needs more accountability and leaders who are accessible to help the general public understand the potential of this new means of exchange,” said Hughes.

 

LAUNCH PARTY DETAILS

Thursday, May 1st, 2014 from 5:00 – 9:00 p.m. PST

Spitfire – 2219 4th Avenue Seattle, WA 98104

 

5:00pm – 6:30pm       Networking and Kiosk demos

6:30pm                       Official Coinme announcement

6:35pm                       Bitcoin Panel

6:55pm                       Audience Q&A

7:00pm                       Kiosk demonstration

7:15pm                       Social and kiosk appointment booking

 

ABOUT COINME

Coinme is on a mission to increase cryptocurrency literacy, build the local cryptocurrency economy and provide the fastest and most secure solution for buying and selling Bitcoin.

COINME INFOGRAPHIC

Coinme partnered with Killer Infographics to create an easy-to-understand explanation of bitcoin and how the Coinme Kiosk works. The infographic can be found here.

 

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For general information please go to: www.coinmekiosk.com and follow @CoinmeKiosk

Press inquiries: press@coinmekiosk.com

General inquiries: hello@coinmekiosk.com

Seconds Is The Fastest Mobile Payment Method Involving Dwolla Or A Credit Card

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As the name suggests, Seconds is the fastest way to make a mobile payment using either Dwolla (digital cash from bank account) or a credit card.

If you are familiar with Seconds you may already know you a transaction can be completed by simply texting the merchant phone number with a keyword (that they previously set up) or any dollar amount value you wish.  With an account already created and payment credential already in place, the transaction instantly takes place securely in the cloud and you are done!

No text boxes to mess with, pinching and zooming or other hassles.

It’s that easy.  Watch this video to see just how easy Seconds payments are…

If you are walking through the mobile web experience for the first time with no previous Seconds account, you will see below we’ve made it a piece of cake to complete.

Click here if you are interested in accepting payments in Seconds >

Go to getseconds.com

payment1

Find the merchant.

payment2

Input the amount.

payment3

Complete payment with Dwolla.

payment4

Or complete payment with credit card.

payment5

It’s that easy.

Click here if you are interested in accepting payments in Seconds >

Seconds Was Just Given A HUGE Holiday Gift, And It’s Not Even Halloween Yet!

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Christmas is still more than 2 months away, but we are already full of holiday cheer.  We have been chosen to be a part of a large holiday tradition, putting Seconds payments on the national stage and changing the trajectory of our company forever.

What it is?  Can’t tell just yet.  But I can tell you it’s not proving mobile payments at Macy’s.  And it’s definitely not a Starbuck’s payments deal, Square already go that one!  Stay tuned for more details in the next few weeks.

But let’s just say Square can’t do what Seconds is about to do.

Lift Off… In Just A Few Seconds

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…6… 5….4….3…2…1…

WE HAVE LIFT OFF.

This is exactly what I am feeling right now as we prepare for our latest release.  And it’s a huge release.  In fact, it’s a company defining release and will launch us into brand new territory.  It involves a Seconds launch event Friday night in Seattle, with hundreds in attendance.  It involves national press coverage.  It has involved weeks of (almost) all-nighters from the team – blood, sweat and tears.

It, by all regards, has been the most challenging but exciting time of each one of our lives.

It also involves a hell of a lot of dev work on the product.  We basically rebuilt Seconds from the ground up, keeping what worked and threw away the unnecessary.  At the time, I didn’t think we could make a more streamlined payment experience, but we did!  This could be taken as blasphemy, but the Seconds payment experience is unlike any other.

If you are are a frequent reader you know we have experienced growth each and every month yet we were struggling to onboard new customers/find the right market.  Based on that situation, during this summer we decided it was time to expand what was working and remove what wasn’t.

If it’s on or after Sep 28th, check Seconds out now!

Here’s a run down of our changes.

1.  We stripped away much of the old merchant experience, it was too clunky and confusing and have drastically redesigned the experience from the ground up.  Seconds is truly a new age payment system, built mobile first. 

2.  We realized the payment experience must be available to everyone (device agnostic), available and functional anywhere the consumer finds themself (proximity agnostic) and merge together communication and transaction for a quick but complete commerce experience.

3.  We created a clean interface for both individual and merchant accounts, easily usable and quicker to complete a task.  The product is even leaner than before and in my opinion, way more potent.

4.  The Seconds experience starts with a simple search bar asking you “who do you want to pay?”  You can make payments by searching name, email, twitter @username, phone number and possibly location, if they are not in our system there will be an option to send a quick invite.  If you find them, you then enter an amount and click pay.  That’s it.  The new interface is an interesting direction we are leaning towards…. The merging of Search and Payments.  It’ll be exciting to see how this will be used and where it will go from here, especially with merchant’s ability to create keywords. ☺

5.  We reimagined what “accepting payments” meant, and have now placed the opportunity one click away from a general Seconds user.  Basically, anyone can instantly upgrade to a “merchant account” if they want.  The cool thing is merchants are users by default, so they can make payments as well as accept them.

6.  We split payment acceptance in two options: a web only account (people are only able to make payments to that account via the web) and a text enabled account (involving both the web and messages sent via text/keyword based payments).  Web only is free.  Text enabled is $5 per month.  All merchants are charged $.50 per transaction through Seconds.  We believe the free monthly option will be a big winner and help increase merchant account creation.

7.  Creating a merchant account and accepting credit card payments can happen in just a few minutes – all on a mobile device if necessary.  It’s truly an amazing experience.  This was not the case just a week or so ago – a recent discovery of a new payments partner is going to open doors previously unimaginable.

8.  Based on these changes our margins are becoming even more awesome.  We enhanced how we are facilitating credit card payments and digital cash payments to create not only a better merchant onboarding but a better overall business.  This is huge and will allow for a nice cashflow in the short term as we get going.

9.  We have decided to focus Seconds on the college/University/Greeklife student market.  We have been told over and over how desperate they are for a sleek payment system where mobile users can quickly make a payment on the fly when they need to.  There is also strong interest in non-profits and donation collections for the same experience.  These two markets have one big thing in common: the payment is the product, in the sense there’s typically no physical product to be served.  This is where we’ll start and should get some strong growth from there.

Below is just a few of the events on our calendar:

Sep 28th – Media Launch of new Seconds payment system

There will be solid media coverage of the launch of our new system.  Sky’s the limit.

Sep 28th – Startup Crawl Fights Poverty

I have organized an event for the startup Seattle community and which will double as a launch party.  It will be a great night, should grab some exposure for Seconds and you are definitely invited if you are in Seattle.   https://soentrepreneurial.com/2012/09/18/the-seattle-startup-crawl-fights-poverty-september-28th-at-5pm-rsvp-now/.

Oct 1st – 3rd. – DEMO Conference

We will be down in SF for the DEMO conference, the trip we won during the SURF Incubator pitch competition.  It will be fun and we’ll be working on meetings and connecting with people there.  If you are in SF, please connect with me.  @jnickhughes.

Oct 16th – 18th –  TwilioCon

Twilio (the platform we use for communications) has invited Seconds to be a part of the event, one of a select group of startups to demo/highlighted during the event.  TwilioCon will be an awesome time for Seconds to get some solid attention from other startups, users, investors and media.

Soon – Dwolla partnernership

Dwolla will be making some big announcements and they have asked us to be associated with the event.  More on this soon!

The 2 Slides in Seconds Pitch Deck That Will Knock Your Socks Off

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Over 4 billion people around the world don’t hold a smartphone or have the ability to download a native payment app, but that shouldn’t exclude them from the mobile payment experience.  All signs are pointing towards payments following the changes mobile technology is bringing to the rest of the world, and if history has anything to say about it a new platform will have to be built from the ground up.  That is why  we are building Seconds.

Seconds is mobile payments using the most intuitive experience we have on our mobile devices – text messaging.

Using the Seconds platform, brands have the ability to identify specific keywords that when sent to their Seconds number automatically trigger transactions for the accurate amount.  We see a whole new payments market opening up where no human being has to be on the other side receiving the payment.  We call these experience Single Party Transactions and they are estimated to grow to almost $10 billion by 2016.

How cool is Seconds?  Here are 2 slides that will knock your socks off.

view demo video

Mobile transactions will drastically change our society and the market for paying by mobile device is said to be well over $1 trillion by 2015.  Most significant will be the transformation in how we use our mobile devices in everyday commerce.

Your Life Happens In Seconds (Video)

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We live our life as a collection of seconds.  Why should it take any longer to make a purchase or connect with brands we care about?

At Seconds, we built a system to drive secure payments through text messages, allowing someone to quickly make a instant and automatic transaction by simply texting a keyword to a merchant.  Amazingly, it only take a second to send a text message.

Think about it, a merchant can now ping your mobile phone with a message informing you to complete the transaction by simply responding with a specific prompt. How would they know to do that? Your phone number can now become your payment credential, and since they can instantly reach you via short message from pretty much anywhere in the world, payments have no limitations.

Imagine how things will change when we all can interact and transact with any brand in the world in Seconds?

Should Paying $950 With A Text Be This Easy? (video)

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Seconds is the simplest way to pay using a mobile device.

Take paying your rent for instance.  It sucks to have to write a check, get a money order or remember to go online and make a payment.  Even if you use an automatic online rent payment system you might not remember what day it will be taken out of your account, which can be frustrating.

So should paying with a text message be this easy?  In a word – yes.  Life shouldn’t require you to download a specific app or stop by the cash machine to get cash.  Seconds is the simple way for you to make a mobile payment for everyday things.

Watch the video below to get an idea of how fast Seconds payments can be.

1. Type “Pay Rent”

2. Confirm the amount

3. Receive a text stating the completion of your payment.

Imagine what else you can pay for with Seconds.  Imagine your life…. in Seconds.

 

The Evolution Of Digital Payments Says Anything Made Of Matter Is Toast

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The payments landscape is changing almost daily and the overall industry is truly one of the most exciting business studies around.    Payments?  Exciting you say?  Yes, well if you don’t’ think $1 trillion up for grabs in the next 5 years is something to get excited about I would check your pulse.

As an natural observer I tend to look under the hood whenever something unusual is going on, since whenever peculiarity is present change happens.   Curiosity is actually what drove me to start Seconds, my mobile payments company.  It all started with observing how consumers interacted with merchants, repeat interactions in particular.  Isn’t it funny how we go to the same coffee shops, restaurants, retail stores, gas stations, and other everyday activities each day.  In fact, we do this so much the person at the counter who “swipes” your card actually recognizes you and may even know your name.

Although loyalty started my entrepreneurial journey, it did not end there.  I started to think a bit deeper about what usually happens each time you go to the coffee shops, restaurants, retail stores, or gas stations?  You got it – payment!  There it is, the one data point which can trace commercial actions, habits, relationships and trends.  Imagine being able to aggregate and see all those data points in your own life.  Things like where you spend your money, how much, when, buying what and how often.  Now imagine it on a merchant wide level.  How about a worldwide level?  I think you get the gist of where we are going.

This thinking brought me to Seconds, which is the fastest way to transact and interact with merchants.  I believe if you speed up a traditionally laborious process, make it available to the widest range of people possible and emancipate the data to be used in adding value to the system, great things will happen.

During this study it came to my attention how much the payment experience has evolved, and how much more it will change.   Below is a quick discussion on where we have come from and where we are going with digital payments.  You will notice this discussion is all about digital payments, since cash and coin have always been available and will still be around for quite some time.   The current focus is on the digital payment experience and the changes we should expect.

Payments 1.0

When plastic cards came into the market the obvious question became “how do we use these things?”  Naturally, swipe terminals popped up in retail locations everywhere, in addition to such places as gas stations and movie theatres.  Major players like Verifone, WorldPay and others transact billions of dollars each day through proprietary devices which translates information from your plastic card into electronic data and ultimately ending in a transaction.

Important to note is the placement and positioning of the terminal, which can be found on the specific merchant’s counter or apparatus.  Why is this important?  Without the terminal, I cannot pay.  No terminal, no card, no soup for you!  This gave credit card companies and the electronic payments companies a leg up in the economic chain.  But innovation has no master and things quickly change.

Payments 1.5

We are currently seeing new methods of swipe transactions involving the mobile device hit the mass market.  These swipe solutions enable a mobile phone or tablet to become, in essence, the terminal itself.  The terminal has jumped off the merchant’s counter and into their hands with products like Square or PayPal empowering anyone to become a merchant.  All anyone needs is a mobile device, the app, and the swipe dongle attached to the device.  They are now ready to take a card payment.

As amazing as these solutions may be I argue they don’t truly change the payments space, they only augment it.  They allow us to use our credit cards at more places – which depending on who you are that could be good or bad – yet it’s still a credit card.  Some people call this mobile payments but it’s really just a mobile terminal. The requirements of products and devices can be cumbersome and troublesome if lost.  Forward progress?  For sure!  But not truly an innovative new movement which will have landscape shifting effects.

Payments 2.0

True innovation upsets the masses and ultimately establishes a new norm, with new rules and new players.  Virtual transactions – payments made without having to swipe, show or display anything – will transform the payments landscape like no one has ever seen before.  Since people carry their mobile devices with them everywhere, it makes the most sense to streamline transactions through the computer in their hands.  True authentic mobile payments do not require any hardware outside of the mobile device.  With cloud computing and offsite secure services holding payment credentials for every consumer, people now have an ability to make simple, quick and easy mobile payments ANYWHERE.  As the consumer, the terminal is now in your hands.

Platform agnostic solutions will enable any mobile device holder to transact and make a purchase with any merchant or brand connected to the platform.  It shouldn’t require me to have an iPhone, Android or any other specific device.  I don’t’ think “sorry, we only accept iPhones” should replace “sorry, we don’t accept American Express.”  Everyone is created equal and every dollar bill is $1.00, no matter who is holding it.  This principle  should remain the same as we evolve into a purely digital society and work through determining the appropriate payment methods.

And as payments become virtual, platforms such as Dwolla start to make a lot more sense.  If you were a merchant looking to accept mobile payments, which would fee you rather pay – a flat 25 cents or between 2-3% of a transaction?  It’s no contest, Dwolla’s fee structure could put credit card companies directly out of business, unless they bring down their fees to a competitive level.

I have said this before but it bears repeating: what if SMS messaging was not only for communications?  What if, as a very efficient information transport  mechanism organically built into billions of mobile devices around the world, it was used for payments and transactions?  Seconds drives secure payments through text messages, allowing someone to quickly make a instant and automatic transaction by simply texting a keyword to a merchant.   Conversely, a merchant can ping your mobile phone with a message to complete the transaction by simply responding with a specific prompt.  How did they know to do that?  Your phone number has now become your payment credential, and interestingly enough they can instantly reach you via short message from pretty much anywhere in the world.  Imagine how things will change when we all can interact and transact with any brand in the world in Seconds?

I am not sure how much quicker we can make things but a second is pretty damn quick.

@jnickhughes

Hey Google Wallet, Square and PayPal – Mobile Payments Should Be This Easy

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NFC is not required.

There’s no app to download.

No special device needed to make a purchase.

Apple’s iOS and Android may be popular operating systems, but they aren’t needed to use Seconds. Seconds merges transactions into one of the most popular technologies in the world, SMS messaging.  More than 234 million consumers holding mobile devices in the U.S. can use our payment system today because they can text.  Step back a second and think about that.  Why are barriers in the way of an everyday activity like payments?  There should be no barrier to usage, no device requirements or specific apps to download.  Isn’t that how mobile payments should be –  simple, quick, easy and available to anyone?

Why is that so important you might ask?  The diffusion and resulting adoption of a new technology is at the mercy of its availability to consumers.  Why did email spread so quickly?  Simply because people only needed a computer and an internet connection.  The same goes with credit cards, people don’t need a special wallet to carry a credit card, they just need it in hand to correctly communicate with the terminal and make a payment.  If mobile payments are to be available to all we must start at the lowest common denominator.  Today’s common denominator is the device – not a specific model or operating system – but the general mobile device itself, which at last count was almost 6 billion worldwide.  That’s a big market.  And the first to grab consumer mindshare will be one of the big winners.

Once an account is set up, which connects Seconds to your mobile device, all you need to do in order to pay for something is type the keyword and you are automatically charged. Or if you have communicated purchase intent with a merchant, they simply hit one button and a confirmation text is sent to your phone.  Interestingly, this makes a consumer’s mobile number their new payment credential and opens up many new avenues for quick mobile transactions.

The video below shows how one of our pilot customers is using Seconds to distribute their food products around Seattle and beyond.  The hungry person approaches the fridge, texts the word ‘wrap’, a payment confirmation is automatically sent back a few seconds later and they grab the wrap and go on their way.  That’s the future folks…  it’s so much a part of the future Walmart, Target and other large retailers are fussin‘ to build a custom mobile payment experience of their own.

Even better, Seconds allows merchants to program their mobile payments system to create any number of keywords with prices attached so their customers can text and pay with certain words sent to the merchants’ Seconds number.  We have already sat around and wondered what happens when Siri gets involved?

Seconds sits at the convergence of communications and transactions, two activities going through tremendous innovation and both which are germane to commerce.  It’s a perfect marriage and a perfect time to merge the two.  Quite frankly, you really don’t want one without the other since more communications leads to more transactions and vice versa. It’s an absolute virtuous cycle for any merchant.

Also realize Seconds dissociates proximity from transaction, meaning I don’t have to be standing in front of a barista or wave my phone on something to make a purchase, the obvious limitation to NFC payments. This frees up the mobile device to become the new payment terminal, a terminal that resides in the consumer’s hand rather than sitting on the merchants counter.

Mobile transactions will explode once the experience is so quick and simple it only takes Seconds to complete.

Welcome to Seconds.

How Facebook Will Conquer Your Real World Identity

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When Facebook released their S-1 announcing their intent to go public, Mark Zuckerberg left no doubt in anyone’s mind they have taken over our digital world.  According to Hitwise, Facebook now accounts for 1 in every 5 pageviews on the web (in the U.S.). It’s crazy to think Facebook wasn’t visionary in the revolutionary sense of the word, they just recognized the world needed a real directory of people, not merely another site to attract users. And indeed, they nailed it. The goal of making its social graph portable and fundamental to the fabric of the Web – and your virtual identity – has certainly been realized.

But can Facebook extend its reach outside the wired world and into your real world? Actually, I don’t think that’s the right question to ask. Maybe the better question is “HOW will Facebook extend its reach into your real world?”

It would seem they are on a tear and the facts are staggering. Hitwise found Facebook.com is now seeing one out of every eleven of their visits coming from the U.S., and 1/5 of all pageviews online in the U.S. takes place on Facebook.com. Their monthly actives grew 21% over the past four months. They are now seeing about 850 million users each month, with half accessing on their mobile device. In 2011, they earned almost $4 billion in revenue and of that, exactly $1 billion was profit. In the S-1 filing, Zuckerberg even goes to the lengths of declaring their intent to fundamentally rewire the way the world works, from interpersonal interactions to commerce to even government.

Facebook’s current revenue is driven mostly by advertising, and analysts are postulating about what exactly led Facebook to IPO.  Maybe it’s a desire to steer where advertising is going, to hopefully make it more personal and relevant for consumers.  But make no mistake, Facebook is already one of the most valuable companies on the planet because of the information they gather.   Age, gender, current city, hometown, employers, education, friends, interests, and now in-app activity and commerce habits are all reasons Facebook is worth an estimated $100 billion.

Yet advertising might not always be their bread and butter since it can only take you so far (just look at what other businesses Google is trying to create) and diversification is the name of the game if you want to protect your longterm business.

This brings us to a natural progression in the digital ecosystem – from advertising to payments. Within the S-1 they revealed their virtual Payments business is already bringing in $557 million in revenue per year. From the filing, Facebook writes that “we may seek to extend the use of Payments to other types of apps in the future.” Although not specific about these other apps, one could think they could include anything that somehow integrates with Facebook.

So it would seem Facebook is on pace to take over the world….. except one big side note, the mobile device. Analysts and the media are already pointing out Facebook has discovered their Kryptonite, which would be the fact that even though almost half of all their users are accessing Facebook from their mobile device, they are generating almost zero revenue from mobile usage.

Facebook risks being left behind as the world turns more of their attention to their mobile devices. Also found in the S-1, Facebook goes to great lengths to admit they have no current way to monetize mobile “We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products. Accordingly, if users continue to increasingly access Facebook mobile products as a substitute for access through personal computers…our revenue and financial results may be negatively affected.”

So while Facebook sees mobile as critical to its future growth, the growing number of people accessing the social network via mobile devices (again, 450 million!) could negatively impact its advertising revenue unless it is able to begin monetizing its mobile usage.

This should not be taken lightly, as anyone in the industry knows mobile is growing at a rapid pace and it’s only going to accelerate. Techcrunch cofounder and guest author Keith Teare, who is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of newly funded just.me, eloquently puts it:

The reason this risk factor jumps out of the page – for me – is that this trend to growing mobile use is inevitable. What is more, it will be both rapid and enormous. How do we know this? Well, human beings are flocking to mobile platforms in droves. This is happening to such an extent that Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker went on the record almost 1 year ago to say that we are now in the 5th major technology cycle of the past half century (mainframe; mini-computer; desktop; internet and now mobile) and that mobile traffic will “grow 26 times over the next 5 years”

Mobile is The Final Frontier to Our Real Life Identity

It has been determined the most valuable network in the digital world is all your personal connections, collected and put together to form the social graph.  Expansive and data rich, this network connects you and me in a way we never would have been able to do before Facebook hit our screens.

But offline, this is not the case since transactions are the fullest expression of commercial interaction. Offline, the most valuable network is comprised of all the loose connections of merchant/customer relationships around the world, all together representing the GDP.  Broken down to each individual, possibly named the commercial graph, one can start to see patterns and degrees of separation forming.

The mobile device is the most direct and personal connection between our digital world to our physical world. We carry them with us all the time and feel naked if we leave them at home. Their use history is a picture perfect snapshot of who we are, made complete with our media and content preferences in addition to our personal calling and messaging history. Your cell phone contact history is, quite frankly, your true and actual real world social network. The location information (what is seen and not seen by the public) draws a direct path of your everyday footsteps. Like it or not, your mobile device is the crystal ball into your existence – a pure blend of your virtual and physical self.

Yet, Facebook has not figured out how to crack that crystal ball. Yes you can access Facebook proper via your mobile device… but it is still within their digital walls. I am curious as to when Facebook’s tenticals will reach outside those walls and into our physical world. And more interestingly, if not Facebook… then who else will it be?

We Express Relationships With Businesses Via Transactions

In the physical world, the truest expression of our commercial relationship with a businesses is through transaction.  If I like a product, I don’t push a button on the shelf right by where its sitting, I buy it.  If I am attracted to a city and want to stay at a nice hotel, I book the room.  Wouldn’t it be great to directly connect with merchants we care about in our life to make those interactions and transactions much easier?  Wouldn’t it be great if it operated similar to what we have become accustomed to in out digital social worlds?  Unfortunately, we cannot indicate a preferred long term relationship with a merchant, both interactional and transactional, driven through our mobile devices (Not yet that is).

With more than 8 trillion text messages sent last year around the world, and the U.S. alone seeing more than a fourth of those messages, messaging is the most predominant use for our mobile device. Research suggests messaging is still growing and arguably this won’t change for the foreseeable future. What if texting wasn’t just meant for communication, but also designed for transaction? It has been estimated that worldwide mobile payments (m-payments) will be over US$1 trillion by 2015. That is one BIG market if I have ever seen one.  And a market any serious digital media company should be focused on.

So if mobile is only going to be more important as time goes on, if our real world identities are tied to our mobile device and if transactions are the most valuable market in the world, it would make sense the next war for supremacy lies right where those three battlefields intersect.

Anyone want to suggest what Facebook has in store in the coming years to deliver returns for their shareholders? If their goal really is to fundamentally rewire the way the world works, from interpersonal interactions to commerce to even government, they need to do more than just show us ads in our news feed.

The advantages to going public at $100 billion is everyone who was a shareholder “before” the IPO will make a nice return on their investments – both time and money. The downfall of going public valued at $100 billion is that for anyone who is a shareholder “after” the IPO is going to need to see that valuation increase drastically to achieve a positive return. How is Facebook going to do that? The multi-trillion dollar worldwide market of physical world payments is probably Facebook’s best bet at making those returns come true.

Your virtual identity is arguably still up for grabs but at this point the front runner is Facebook with almost 1 billion users worldwide. The question is who will own your real world identity?

Even more interesting is wondering if we can fight for our real world identity or will we succumb to the greatest virtual social network on earth overtaking our physical world as well?