SMS Power

This is really, really powerful to me. This is a small example. But this has huge implications.

If you still doubt GroupMe's potential, just watch this video.

Texting Teens

Image via Wikipedia

Nielsen Wire: U.S. Teen Mobile Report: Calling Yesterday, Texting Today, Using Apps Tomorrow: No one texts more than teens (age 13-17), especially teen females, who send and receive an average of 4,050 texts per month. ..... Texting is currently the centerpiece of mobile teen behavior. 43 percent claim it is their primary reason for getting a cellphone, which explains why QWERTY input is the first thing they look for choosing their devices. ..... All of this texting activity has come at the expense of voice. .... popular apps such as Facebook, Pandora or YouTube.

The teens of today are the adults of tomorrow. Teens are trend setters. The shift from texting to apps is early stage but is pretty telling.

Related articles

• U.S. Teen Mobile Report: Calling Yesterday, Texting Today, Using Apps Tomorrow (Nielsen Wire) (techmeme.com)
• Nielsen's Teen Mobile Report shows telling trend in mobile data usage (crunchgear.com)
• Teens Still Love Texting, But Mobile App Use Is Growing (nytimes.com)
• Study: Teens text every 10 minutes (voices.washingtonpost.com)
• Teens Still Love Texting, But Mobile App Use is Growing (readwriteweb.com)
• Hold My Calls. Forward My Texts. (wired.com)
• Nielsen's Teen Mobile Report Shows Telling Trends In Mobile Data Usage (mobilecrunch.com)
• New Anti-Sexting App Doomed To Failure [Redacted] (jezebel.com)
• CHART OF THE DAY: Teens Send Or Receive 3,339 Texts Per Month! (businessinsider.com)
• US Teens Cause 'Fourfold Increase' In Mobile Data Usage (intomobile.com)

Venmo Me For My Charm

Good things can happen at a Buzzd party. (Buzzd Party Thursday) If you need to know, my Venmo handle is the same as my Twitter handle which is my first name. (@paramendra)

Finally Google Has Figured Out A Way To Keep Up With My Blog

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Venmo And Frictionless Payments

Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year?
Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way
The FourSquare Appeal For Me
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

Venmo | Thrillist if you send funds to a Venmo newbie, they'll get a passcode & instructions to set up an account and claim the funds, although unfortunately, without the added benefit of aiding a misunderstood, exiled Nigerian prince ..... deals with a number of University City food trucks (Coup de Taco, HubBub, Don Memo...) to accept Venmo payments, and're currently wrapping up similar arrangements w/ Starr Restaurant Group and Marathon -- who you'd pay through the nose via any method just to never have to run in one.
Venmo: The Future of Payments | innonate many of us have friends and contacts we'd trust enough to take money right out of our wallet! .... where this will get super interesting is when restaurants and other venues get into the mix.
Text your bill to Venmo| The Daily Pennsylvanian The system is intended to replace cash, and will be the future of payments ..... “Our goal is to become the number one payment processor in the country” ...... Kortina and Magdon-Ismail came up with the idea when they were at a concert and could not buy the band’s CD because there was no way for the musician to accept credit card payments. ....... they did not want to create something internet-based just for the iPhone because not everyone has one. “But we liked the simplicity of text messaging” ...... e used to send money to friends for utilities or splitting bills. ..... for sorority and fraternity fundraisers ..... make purchases off of Craigslist. .... useful even for businesses that already accept credit cards but want to better engage their customers. .... “In about a year, everyone on Penn’s campus will be using it,” said Magdon-Ismail. “It’s the future of how we’re all going to pay for things.”
Venmo: Mobile Payment Start-Up | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD Venmo, a stealthy but buzzy start-up that just closed its first funding round. The four-man team gathered up something in the $300,000 to $400,000 range ..... . Investors include Betaworks, Lerer Media Ventures, and, oddly, given that it’s a modest angel funding round, RRE Ventures. ..... The big difference between Venmo and its much bigger mobile payment competitors–both Boku and Zong, for instance, have millions of venture capital dollars behind them–is that Venmo doesn’t involve the mobile carriers, which can take 30 percent or more of each transaction they process. .... charging commercial users–your local coffee shop or flea market vendor or whatever business sets up an account–a 3.5 percent fee for each transaction. ..... The Venmo team–headed by Betaworks veteran Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail
Venmo| CrunchBase Profile
Announcing Our Investment in Venmo all transactions are reversible and the exchange of money is capped at $500.
Venmo — Technically Philly
Episode 65 –Venmo: SMS-based Payments – The Web 2.0 Show
Venmo: Texting its way to a cash-free future
"We allow people to make cash transactions without the hassle of carrying cash", says Jameel Farruk of Venmo ..... It's the lack of fees that Venmo believes will allow it to become popular..... Currently, it is free to add money to your Venmo account, send money, receive money and even withdraw money to your bank account. There is no minimum to load on your account, send and receive money or to withdraw to your bank account. In the future, Venmo plans to make money by charging users a fee for an expedited transfer to your bank account, which currently takes about the same amount of time as a standard bank transfer. ..... three basic functions of Venmo; Pay, Charge and Trust. ..... the ability to reverse a trusted charge for 24 hours and a maximum transaction of $500 ...... one of the best solutions yet.
Venmo is hot sh-t « eat. shop. love. nyc.
Venmo gets viral for Haiti relief, text payments
Venmo
Venmo Voted Best Mobile Company in the Eastern Region, and Raises... In less than a week, the Relief Foundation has raised over $15,000 through Venmo text message donations, $600 of which was raised in the 3 minute demo during the presentation.
RRE Ventures –Venmo Featured In TIME. Venmo is an RRE Seed...
YouTube - How To Collect Text Message Donations with Venmo...
Venmo Raised a Round from Top Angel Investors Gigsly

Frictionless Payments - 10 Tech Trends for 2010 - TIME Micropayments were a $1 billion industry in 2009. .... A startup called Venmo 
Friction in online payments | Institute For The Future In a world where almost 4.6 billion people have a cell phone, we should be leveraging cell phones more for payments. .... services like m-Pesa in Africa that enable mobile phone users to transfer money via mobile phones. .... Zong and Boku ... the payment amount is added to the mobile phone bill.
The Future of Money: It's Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free What if people could transfer money over Twitter for next to nothing, simply by typing a username and a dollar amount? ....But now engineers can focus on building applications, while leaving the regulatory and risk-management issues to PayPal. “I can focus on the social side of the business and not on touching money,” as Ivey puts it.
Frictionless - and Almost Free - Payments? tear down the stronghold the banks and credit card companies have built
M-Banking Kiva M stands for mobile and Pesa is Kiswahili for money. ..... a service that Safaricom, the most popular cell phone service in Kenya, offers (Zain, its largest competitor offers a similar service). Touted as a “branchless banking service” M-PESA users can deposit and withdraw money on their phone by utilizing a network of agents stationed throughout the country – mostly airtime vendors and phone salesman. .... weekly group repayment and disbursal meetings instead of home visits, decreases costs significantly ..... having these borrowers repay their loans via mobile might vastly improve efficiency ..... here are only a few other countries/companies that offer this service: Afghanistan, Tanzania, South Africa, a pilot program in Uganda and two very successful services in the Philippines.... there were $93 billion in remittances transferred from abroad to Africa every year.

Venmo's Restful Coolness (rafer.tumblr.com)
Venmo's Simple, Loaded Premise: Pay Your Friends From Your Phone (gigaom.com) Kortina recently left his job at Bit.ly and took a bridge loan from Sam Lessin and other individuals to pursue Venmo full time. ..... you can Venmo someone $3 with the message “grab me a coffee” ...... he casual spectrum of transactions ...... after the major earthquake in Haiti earlier this year, people donated more than $35 million through $5 and $10 text messages
Q&A: The New Digital Cash (blogs.wsj.com) Venmo, a tiny start-up launched in April 2009, has developed a system to let anyone exchange money through a cellphone text message...... About a year ago, [Venmo co-founder] Iqram [Magdon-Ismail] was visiting me in NYC for the weekend and had forgotten his wallet in Philly. He did have his phone, though. I covered him for the entire weekend, and he ended up mailing me a check to pay me back. I don’t think I ever cashed it. ...... a guy with a food truck in West Philly who does not have email, but has a cell phone and accepts Venmo ....... payments that may not have necessarily ever happened before....... A friend of mine tips the bartender *before* arriving at the bar, and has a drink waiting for him when he arrives. ..... I don’t see any reason why you should not be able to use Venmo to pay a Square merchant. ..... . The part of Venmo that is most exciting is Trust...... I get a notification anytime someone I trust charges me and I have the ability to reverse charges ..... you tend to only trust people that you actually trust in real life

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