Venmo In Flight

It feels like yesterday that Venmo was taking its baby steps.

Venmo Could Make Moves
Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year?
Venmo And Frictionless Payments
Venmo Me For My Charm
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

Look at them now, processing 250 million dollars a year.

VentureBeat: Venmo, now processing $10M a month, comes out of beta, offers me the world’s smallest bribe

Related articles

• Re: is Venmo a huge roadblock to Bitcoin?
• Venmo History is Social
• On Venmo and Payments
• Don't Have Paypal? No Problem!
• The Regretsy PayPal Debacle and Online Payment Alternatives

• Will Mobile Devices Kill the Credit Card? (bigthink.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

Related articles by Zemanta

• Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year? (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Venmo And Frictionless Payments (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• ChatVille Is Live Now: "What ChatRoulette Should Have Been" (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Mobile Payments: A Guide to the Growing Market in Your Pocket (gigaom.com)
• Chatfe: Audio, Interest Based Random Connections On Skype? (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• The Most Exciting Things We Saw at SxSW (impact.webershandwick.com)
• The NYC Echo Chamber (It's a good thing!) (adventurista.com)
• Q&A: The New Digital Cash (blogs.wsj.com)
• The Virtual High Five (or the Venmo Mavens Game) (marketing.fm)
• Venmo Could Make Moves (technbiz.blogspot.com)

Job Search

I came across a job opening with Union Square Ventures as a regular reader of Fred Wilson's blog. (Who Is Andrew Parker?) I went ahead and applied. (Union Square Ventures Job Opening: I Am Applying, Managing Al, Brad, Fred: An Opportunity To Jump For, Fred Wilson: A DJ) Fred emailed me saying I was "overqualified." (Not Union Square Ventures) I did not get the job, but I got a huge compliment. I took it.

Maybe I am just right for FourSquare, I thought, the tech company with the most buzz in town right now. (4:16 PM @ FourSquare, FourSquare Office, Dropio Technology, The FourSquare Appeal For Me) They said to talk to "Evan." I like Twitter fine, more than fine, but I kinda would like to stay put in New York City.

Then I got interested in Venmo, briefly, as perhaps the FourSquare for 2011. (Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year?, Venmo And Frictionless Payments, Venmo Could Make Moves) I sent a tweet expressing interest to the two founders. I think they like me better as a fan blogger.

Then I started looking at some old economy jobs online. In the process I came across some Yahoo New York jobs. I applied. All you had to do was press a button. Easy in, easy out. If Yahoo, then why not Google? So I found myself getting really interested in Google. (Has Google Been Able To Scale Well?, Chrome Operating System, Google Is Having A TechCrunch Day, Google New York) You apply at their site, and the process is a lot of fun. But that was a week ago. Fred, thanks for that email, really. (Not Union Square Ventures

• Account Executive, Google Mobile Advertising - New York
  
• Display Account Manager - New York
  
• Services Relationship Manager, DoubleClick for Advertisers (DFA) - New York
  
• Display Advertising Management Specialist - New York
  
• Display Advertising Management Specialist - New York
  
• Sales Operations Manager, Strategy - New York
  
• Advertising Programs Coordinator, Cross Platform Solutions - New York
  
• Custom Media Solutions Strategist, Media and Platforms - New York
  
• Head of Buy-Side Advertiser Services - New York
  
• Strategic Partner Development Manager for TV, YouTube - New York
  
• Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Mobile Advertising - New York
  
• Strategic Partner Manager, Print Content Partnerships - New York

In my cover letters to Google, I tried to impress upon them that I was a smart person. I made sure I mentioned the butterfly effect, the biggest thing going on for me right now. Paul Orlando got into the picture. He has a friend - Anant Singh - at Google. But so far it has been all quiet on the western front. It has been over a week. (Chatfe: Audio, Interest Based Random Connections On Skype?)

http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2010/05/has-google-been-able-to-scale-well.html
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8941937340106225163
http://www.linkedin.com/in/paramendra

I'd love to join Google on the business side of its advertising business out of its NYC offices.

I was the number one student in my class at the top school in Nepal for the seven out of 10 years I was there. I was selected to the University of Chicago but the money part did not work out so I went to the school that has the best financial aid program in all of America, Berea College in Kentucky, the number one liberal arts college in the South. I got myself elected student body president at Berea within six months of landing as an international student. In 1999 I was one of the founding members of Chaitime.com that raised 25 million dollars round two before it succumbed to the nuclear winter. We were trying to be the premier South Asian online community.

There is a concrete mathematical theory called the butterfly effect. A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon forest could be the reason a cyclone hit Bangladesh. In April 2006, over a period of 19 days, about eight million people out of the country's 27 million came out into the streets to shut the country down completely to force a dictator out. I was the butterfly flapping my wings in New York City.

A few days back I got an email from Alex Cybriwsky. I got just the job for you, he said, Scott is hiring. There was an opening for a Community Specialist at MeetUp.com. I promptly applied. It felt like a great fit. I am a people person in the tech sector. Years ago I described MeetUp as a 5.0 company; 5.0 is face time. I wrote a great cover letter.

I like it that this job will bring MeetUp and me together. MeetUp has
huge global potential. And I am so glad it is profitable already.
MeetUp is what I call a 5.0 company. 5.0 is face time. I blogged about
that concept years ago.

MeetUp has an imbalance. It pours too much of its resources into tech,
and not enough into all the MeetUp action that takes place during face
time. I'd like to help MeetUp strike a better balance.

I am a people person. I got myself elected student body president at
my college - the number one liberal arts school in the South - within
six months of landing as an international student: about eight SGA
veterans had run against me. That was a lot of talking to a lot of
people. Only five months before I had lost the race for Freshman Class
President. Everyone else got more votes than me.

It is also about NYC, this capital city of the world. I absolutely
love this city, and I love the outer boroughs as much as Manhattan.
MeetUp has had a tendency to do well in the big cities of the world,
and so NYC is a great place to build templates and experiment with
them to take across the world.

Group dynamics is just like coding. Group dynamics is beyond common
sense. It is sophistication, it is skill, it is knowledge, it is
talent, it is a specialty.

The job of Community Specialist seems to be custom made for me. I like
the idea of being able to work any five days of the week, and do some
of the work from home. I like that flexibility. I look forward to
attending even more MeetUps than I already do, have done for years.

A friend of mine once said several months back, Scott has organized
more people than lesser people running for president. I thought that
was a remarkable thing to say.

I would like to work at least one day every weekend, some times both days
of the weekend, but I'd like it to be flex each week, some weeks I'd
like to work Monday to Friday, some weeks Tuesday to Saturday. Some
weeks I'd like to take Tuesday and Thursday off. I don't do well with
structure. Some randomness helps me stay creative.

I'd want to organize my work week around attending as many MeetUps as
possible. We have to be out there among the star Organizers. We have
to be where the action is.

Please check my blogs for my writing samples. Besides being naturally
a people person, I am a great, great writer. And I am addicted to
communication. I thrive on emails and message boards. I love to meet
people. I love to call them up. I like to party. I dance to sweat.

As for salary requirements, I am aware there is a bias that says
coders make more than people with soft skills. But I encourage you to
value both equally. This has to be extra true for MeetUp. This company
was born valuing face time.

I am hoping the salary approaches six figures, or maybe even is six
figures. But I am open to negotiation. I don't just want a job, I want
to build a team around me inside the company that will help MeetUp be
not just a great tech company but also a great group dynamics company.
Human interaction is just like coding. There is art and science
involved.

I look forward to formally joining the team that I have felt I have
been part of for years now.

I have had visions of ending up the Chief People Person at MeetUp.com, on par with the CTO: Hello Greg. I am a people person in the tech sector.

April 2010 NY Tech MeetUp
Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever
FourSquare Office, Dropio Technology
NY Tech MeetUp: Europe Edition
December 2009 NY Tech MeetUp
November 3 NY Tech MeetUp
My Talk On Social Media At The Science House MeetUp
Sitting Next To David Rose At The NY Tech MeetUp
MeetUp Mailing List Web 5.0 Controversy
October 2009 NY Tech MeetUp
The Science House MeetUp
NY Tech MeetUp: 02/03/09
MeetUp.com 2.0
NY Tech Meetup: Gravitas
September 2009 NY Tech Meetup
Diller Country, Month 2
Open Coffee MeetUp: New Location
Microsoft, Google, Facebook: NY Tech MeetUp Has Arrived
Nic Butterworth's Open Coffee MeetUp
July 2009 NY Tech Meetup
May 5 NY Tech MeetUp
Whuffie: Vamsi Sistla
Nic Is Back

My immigration nightmare might finally be over. I should get my work papers any time now. They said "four to six weeks, maybe eight weeks" on March 30. So. And hopefully the paper turns into a green card in a year. They decide on it in June 2011. Even if they do, it might take them another three months to get the paperwork through. The immigration bureaucracy runs at a fashionably sluggish pace.

June 3 Immigration Court Date

I am not someone who lost his job to the Great Recession. I am not someone whose startup did not take off. I am not someone whose startup fizzled out. I am someone who has been out of status. That is about to end.

Me @ BBC

My status puts me squarely in the job space.

A few days back the thought of going to work full time for the Reshma Saujani For Congress campaign for three and a half months did cross my mind. That might be a step down from my "Superstar Volunteer" status - what Reshma calls me - and it would be  a major pay cut from a possible tech sector job. So, Scott. (@heif)

Reshma Saujani, Haiti Earthquake, Harvard Yale, And 2016

When I presented at the Dot Com Hatchery in January, good thing they drove me out of the building. If an investor had become excited enough to want to put in the money into the venture, I would not have known what to do with the money. I prompted the Hatchery people to invent the Gong Rule. Ask them what that is.

Presenting At The Dot Com Hatchery

Related articles by Zemanta

• New York City Names Winners of Apps Contest (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Google TV's Warm Reception (businessweek.com)
• What Are You Doing Monday? Come Meet Al Wenger (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Never Mind the Valley: Here's New York City (readwriteweb.com)
• New York Isn't Silicon Valley. That's Why They Like It. (nytimes.com)
• TechCrunch Disrupt 2010: How To Watch LIVE (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)
• Check Out Meetup's New Free Product, "Meetup Everywhere" (businessinsider.com)

Venmo Could Make Moves

Peer to peer payments can be thought of as a great first step for Venmo, but staying there will not bring it hockey stick growth. How often to you pay money to your friends? On the other hand, how often do you pay money at a bar? Or a restaurant?

One place to start might be at the bar where the NY Tech MeetUp hosts its after party. The NY Tech MeetUp crowd would be a great crowd to get hold of.

Another stop on the way might be the 2,000 vendors on FourSquare that have been identified as merchants that might qualify for merchant accounts. I believe they now have the option to call up FourSquare, verify ownership of their spaces, and activate their merchant accounts. That would give them options to better track all those who do check into their establishments.

Venmo might want to partner up with FourSquare to give those 2,000 establishments a heads up on the Venmo way of accepting payments. People likely to check in using FourSquare are also more likely than most to be the early believers in the idea of paying for your drink with a text message. Pay Drink Bar $6 for beer. That might take less time and effort than pulling out the wallet to dole out cash, wait for change, perhaps wait to sign a credit card receipt.

In FourSquare I see a partnership opportunity for Venmo.

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

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Virtual High Five (or the Venmo Mavens Game) (marketing.fm)
• The Most Exciting Things We Saw at SxSW (impact.webershandwick.com)
• Zong Emerges: Facebook Deal And $15 Million In Funding (techcrunch.com)
• Mobile Payment Provider Zong Raises $15 Million Following Spin-Off (paidcontent.org)
• Paypal app goes 2.0, adds Bump integration (tuaw.com)
• Zong Collects $15M for Mobile Payments (gigaom.com)
• NY Tech Meetup Debuts New Monthly Feature (nextny.org)

Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year?

2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

2009 was Twitter's year. 2010 is looking to be FourSquare's year. Twitter is in a better shape today than ever before, but it no longer has the buzz it had last year around this time. FourSquare's buzz will also subside. That is the nature of the innovation market. If they don't make the mistake of selling the company, (FourSquare Must Cut A Deal With Yahoo) I think FourSquare will go on to be a viable business that is no longer always in the headlines. Some company will take the space that FourSquare will at some point exit. Which company will that be? I might be proven wrong, but if I had to take a guess, if I were forced to come up with one name, the horse I am betting on is Venmo.

2011 could very well be Venmo's year. Venmo is a hot possibility that some venture capitalist wanting to strike gold needs to lap it up fast. The Venmo team deserves to go work full time on their beautiful product. They are onto something big.

Granted 2009 was 2009, the year of the Great Recession, but plenty of companies were getting funded despite that, and FourSquare was not one of them. They landed at South By Southwest last year with a thud. They were not going anywhere trying to raise money. They approached Yelp. Yelp would not invest. FourSquare's fortunes started picking up only later in the year. Location became a buzz word, and by now all that pain from early last year must feel like a distant memory.

Venmo does frictionless payments. Venmo is in the mobile web space. But it can do the old web good too.

I don't think Venmo will get called the next FourSquare like FourSquare is being called the next Twitter, and I don't think the buzz will be with any one company in 2011, likely it will be fractured and distributed among a few different names, and we might not even have to wait for 2011 to roll around; it might happen earlier. But Venmo sure is in sweet space.

When I said to Iqram (@iqram) last night at the Digital Dumbo party (Digital Dumbo: Here I Come) that 2011 could very well be Venmo's year, he immediately sent $10 to my Venmo account for my "kind words." That's what the email says. At the after party of the NY Tech MeetUp when they presented, Kortina (@kortina) sent me 40 cents, and that is how I got started on Venmo. That was a few months back.

Frictionless Payments - 10 Tech Trends for 2010 - TIME
Friction in onlin payments | Institute For The Future
The Future of Money: It's Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free...
Frictionless - and Almost Free - Payments?

@iqram, @kortina, @venmo

Related articles by Zemanta

• The NYC Echo Chamber (It's a good thing!) (adventurista.com)
• 4:16 PM @ FourSquare (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Venmo's Restful Coolness (rafer.tumblr.com)
• The Virtual High Five (or the Venmo Mavens Game) (marketing.fm)
• FourSquare Office, Dropio Technology (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Venmo's Simple, Loaded Premise: Pay Your Friends From Your Phone (gigaom.com)
• Should brands ask for reviews? (sharemarketing.wordpress.com)
• Q&A: The New Digital Cash (blogs.wsj.com)
• Is it better to Yelp or to Tweet? (smartblogs.com)

2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

I am not suggesting all four spaces carry equal weight; they don't. Location carries more weight than all the rest put together. 2010 is location's year. By now that is conventional wisdom. I can see why, and I buy into it. But these strike me as spaces to watch for this year. One of the other three might claim 2011 as their year. And I am open to adding other spaces to the list if I can find them, read up on them, imagine them. This list of four is by far not exhaustive. Charlie (@ceonyc) had a blog post a few weeks back (my comment) that ranked high on my vision grid, and he talked about some spaces he would like to see action in as an early stage investor. And he does not even touch upon these four spaces. So what you are looking for impacts what you see. There's plenty of exciting stuff happening in many directions. The 2010s will be what the 1990s should have been but weren't. We will dream big again, only this time there will be less fluff. Real businesses will get built. Old industries will get reinvented. New industries will see light of day. These are exciting times.

(1) Location

I'd be rooting for FourSquare even if it were half the size of Gowalla, but it makes it easier to root for because it is crushing the competition. But like the Google and Amazon people will tell you, don't spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror. Focus on customer feedback more. Grow.

Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius

The mobile web is bigger and is growing faster than the old web. Location is key to the mobile web. FourSquare has itself a sweet, sweet spot. All the best to Dennis (@dens) and Naveen. (@naveen)

(2) Random Connections

Chatroulette Is For Real

We could have had Mark Zuckerberg, but instead we lost him to the Valley. We should try better with Andrey. We want people all over the world to be able to meet random New Yorkers. There's the fun in sharing.

(3) The Inbox

ReadWriteWeb: Gmail Becomes an App Platform: Google Adds OAuth to IMAP ....Syphir, which lets you apply all kinds of complex rules to your incoming mail and then lets you get iPhone push notification for your smartly filtered mail.
Rapportive - an incredible GMail contacts plug-in.
Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail

Everything is email, if you think about it. When I first started blogging, I was like, great, I no longer need to flood people's inboxes. All I have to do is send them a link to a blog post. Facebook is email. People who don't know you don't email you, and people who email you are only one click away if you want to know the latest in their lives. No need to call them up, or ask them. Twitter is the ultimate email. Eric Schmidt even called it that, but he was a little miserly in the description. A poor man's email? I am poor, everyone is poor by Eric's standards, but hey! FourSquare is email. I am emailing you my location.

Don't give up on email. Email is here to stay. There is so much that can be done with the inbox. I am glad some startups are looking into it.

For now all I want is about four different inboxes. Inbox 1, emails only from individuals whose addresses I have saved. Inbox 2: emails from those people that are going out to more than me. Inbox 3: emails from mailing lists I have subscribed to. Inbox 4: everyone else.

(4) Frictionless Payments

Venmo is my FourSquare in this space. I take hometown pride in Venmo. But then supporting FourSquare and Venmo is like supporting Obama. (Jupiter And Obama) It helped that the guy was outstanding. I get the impression Venmo is also a leader in this crowded space. It was listed in Time magazine as one of the top 50 sites of 2009, along with Drop.io, another hometown goodie. (@lessin)

It is like this, there was barter trade back in the days. Then they had coins, some coins were as big as cart wheels. Then paper money. Then plastic. Then PayPal. We are about to hit the next phase. That is where Venmo comes in.

In my homevillage in Nepal growing up, I saw rice used as currency. Farm workers got paid in rice. Vegetable vendors would give you vegetables for rice. And it was pretty smooth, as in frictionless, enough to give Kortina a run for his money. (@kortina)

What I am telling you, Kortina, is rice as currency is pretty cutting edge, and there was major trust involved.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The NYC Echo Chamber (It's a good thing!) (adventurista.com)
• Whoops -- Facebook Is Once Again Overhyped (businessinsider.com)
• Facebook Does What's Best For Facebook (e1evation.com)
• Facebook users concerned about privacy, says survey (telegraph.co.uk)
• Why We Need an Open "Like" Standard (gigaom.com)
• Three core developer features from Facebook (vator.tv)
• Graphic Reality (technbiz.blogspot.com)
• Marketing To The Sadly Underappreciated Email Inbox (rohitbhargava.typepad.com)
• How Facebook will win the Internet and why that scares the shit out of me (caterpillarcowboy.com)