Tag Archives: SMS

A New Article Covering Seconds Points To Our Larger Vision Of Payment Identity

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Seconds was recently covered on BetaKit, here’s a snippet:

Smartphone growth is trending upward worldwide, but there’s still a huge percentage of the population using feature phones, and another group of users for whom a stable and consistent data connection is little more than a dream. A couple recent startups are poised to address those markets directly, both in emerging markets and in North America… Read more.

I want to highlight something that came out in the interview that points to the real game changer in mobile payments, although we don’t talk about it too much at this point.

Seconds isn’t just about SMS, however; Hughes said the bigger picture is in establishing user profiles that can be attached to any tech. “We’re more about the software and the identity,” he told us. “Attaching that user identity to other platforms is relatively simple.” That strategy should allow Seconds to work with other mobile communication tech, including NFC and Bluetooth 4.0, as they accrue more popularity.

I believe the winner (or winners) in the mobile payment space will be oriented around a consumer’s identity, meaning everything is aggregated  and organized for both my benefit and the greater merchant ecosystem no matter what method of payment I use.  This is important to the future of commerce and we intend to be a major player.

@jnickhughes

Order SM Takes Home The Second Place People’s Choice Award at Seattle Beta!

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The first annual Seattle Beta was held on Tuesday October 11th, and Order SM took home second place on the people’s choice.  We were highlighted in TechnologyWeek:

Seattle Beta held its first event last night. It turned out great , the whole room was packed and there were plenty of people buzzing about the new companies.  13 companies were listed on the roster. The format was an open room with many booths. It was very casual and everyone was mingling the whole night. We only got interrupted once by Softlayer who was a sponsor, they wanted to announce an open bar for 15 minutes. The 13 companies were 9Slides, Cloak, Govpinion, Habit Labs, KindleGraph, MobileAppTracking, Omnom, OfferUp, OrderSM, ReadyPulse, Timber Software, Toolz.me, and Wiavia. The venue was packed and it was hard to walk from room to room.

 Order SM placed second among 13 Seattle startups, and it was a solid second place.  The results came from an email the day after:

We’d like to give a special thank you to the demoers, and announce the results of the voting you did with those poker chips.

The demo that got the most chips was HasOffers, showing off  www.mobileapptracking.com, with 95 chips.

In second place was OrderSM (thanks for helping route our drinks!) with 80 chips.

In third place was OfferUp with 56 chips.

Jay from TechnologyWeek was on hand and actually placed an order through Order SM.  His experience:

I used OrderSM last night to order a beer, it is a service that allows customers to text simple orders directly to the staff. This company is showing a lot of good effort to bring their product to market. The service remembers who you are and when you text in the future it uses that knowledge to facilitate making the process faster. They have plans to incorporate payment into the service as well. It is as simple as texting, “Bring 2 Blue Moons please”. I did this last night, I got a text back, “Sure thing Jay, where are you at?”. Me: “Backroom.” Five minutes later the beer was delivered directly to me and I didn’t need to leave the conversation I was in. Look for our article on this company shortly.

In addition to Jay, we saw a number of orders placed using Order SM and the attendees were quite impressed with the entire concept.  This event result was just another moment of truth for the Order SM team, proving once again we have a great product with a strong value proposition.