
Twitter Inventor About To Launch His Next Project, Code-named Squirrel - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/08/nuts-twitter-inventor-about-to-launch-his-next-project-code-named-squirrel/
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johns
This could be killer if it lets you do person-to-person money transfers like
PayPal. If my buddy can pay me back for the movie tickets I bought him earlier
with his iPhone and have it go straight to my bank account, I would definitely
use it. Obviously there are security and other barriers to overcome but it's
not an impossible problem. You don't really need the hardware for this type of
thing though.

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vaksel
why wouldn't your buddy just pay you in cash next time he saw you?

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GeneralMaximus
Your question can be answered by another question: why do we use credit cards?
Why not use cash for everything?

~~~
pj
Answer: Credit cards enable the user to live beyond his or her means and cash
does not.

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FooBarWidget
I only use my credit card as a payment method. Most online shops don't accept
anything but credit card, and sometimes I just don't have enough cash with me
and don't want to bother walking to the closest ATM.

Credit cards allow you to loan money but I think that's ridiculous. I don't
want to have a debt every time I buy something, I just want to pay
immediately, with the money I already have, not with money that I don't have.

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gahahaha
Nothing bad about the Twitter Inventor, but there was (A LOT) of luck involved
in the success of Twitter. His next project might be interesting, but it is
99.999% certainly not a new blockbuster like Twitter.

~~~
menloparkbum
_but there was (A LOT) of luck involved in the success of Twitter._

Actually there wasn't a lot of luck. Twitter is something that users actually
wanted: a broadcast "status" update that wasn't just on their instant message
client.

Twitter is successful because they remained positive and persevered while
other people capable of making a similar system didn't do anything about it.
Grumpy programmers just posted confused blog posts and forum comments about
it. "Twitter? Huh? I don't get it." Nobody really tried to compete with them
head on, and they still don't have any real competition. People say facebook
is their main competition, and they are right, but Facebook has so much
baggage of being something else that isn't Twitter that it seems unlikely
people will ever consciously choose between one or the other. More likely
people will use both services.

It's a bit of luck that anyone cares about posting their status online but
it's not really luck that they are using Twitter to do so... What else would
they use?

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c3o
You wouldn't say Pownce tried competing with them head-on?

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axod
Not afaik. Pownce had features.

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tekmanrj
Sans-hardware (not supported until 3.0), there are a lot of apps for the
iPhone that do credit card processing, including the one that's on Apple TV ad
right now: <http://innerfence.com>

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oldgregg
As someone who has spent countless hours looking for a good wireless point of
sale system this is going to be huge.

Small retailers will snap this up and avoid the evil merchant companies. All
of the inventory management and reporting lives in the cloud. Right now,
besides opentable, all of the POS stuff is either really expensive or garbage.

The only comparable thing right now is a Symbol MC70 with Windows Mobile and
an external swiper. Apple retail uses them and they are $3k+ a pop. You can
get some knock of Pidion 1300s for $1200. All the software is "enterprise"
garbage.

This device will be given away at cost. Pair it with an ipod touch and small
business climb on board in mass. A whole new slew of small business,
babysitters, and freelancers will accept credit cards.

They cleanup in merchant fees at the very least, and quite possibly create the
holy grail of mobile-to-mobile payments -- all nicely integrated into twitter.

~~~
patio11
_freelancers will accept credit cards._

Most freelancers I work with (granted: high tech folks, generally) already do.
Paypal, how I love you, let me count the ways...

Speaking of which: if you want to be extra special nice to your favorite
freelancer, pay them through Paypal's batch interface. It reduces the cost to
receive the money from essentially 2.9% of the transaction to a flat fee of
$1. When you're settling up $2000 invoices, that means a significant amount of
money in their pocket rather than Paypal's. All it takes is for you to write a
one-line text file and click a button on Paypal.

[https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_batch-payment-
ove...](https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_batch-payment-overview-
outside)

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scorpioxy
Wasn't this the original idea behind Paypal? Wireless money transfer via PDAs?

I remember reading that it was an idea ahead of its time due to the lack of
spread of mobile computing. Now that phones are getting smarter, maybe it has
a better chance.

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sammyo
(Just a rant here:-) but won't the next industry changing payment service be
true micro-payments?

