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Mobile Payments Pioneer: I'm Betting on Bitcoin For Emerging Markets
For mobile payments pioneer and venture capitalist Carol Realini, the financial world is divided into three camps: those who believe in bitcoin, those who don't understand it and those have yet to consider or study its technology. Realini identifies firmly as a bitcoin believer, though she's not surprised many of her peers don't share her sentiment. After all, the former CEO of Obopay - a mobile payments application provider that raised more than $140m, but whose profile declined amid increased interest in mobile wallets - has a blazed a unique trail in the world of payments. This has....
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Social messaging applications play an important role in our daily lives, and several companies are targeting developing markets in order to build a large user base. Line, Japan’s most popular social messaging application, has introduced their Line Lite app and made it available to eleven emerging markets. Facilitating payments is just one of the many features available, and Bitcoin could prove to be an interesting candidate. Line – Social Messaging, Mobile Payments & Much More. When people talk about social messaging platforms, the usual suspects such as Facebook and iMessage come to mind.....
Sarah Boone Martin is founder of Rock the Coin, an organisation that engages in grassroots community outreach about bitcoin. She is also CEO of Boone Martin, a global communications firm that focuses on social impact investing. Many of the greatest challenges faced by bitcoin today - adoption, scale and regulation - mirror those of its predecessor: mobile money. When launched in 2007, mobile money was just as foreign and raised as much alarm as bitcoin. Though it has since spread to 60 million active users, mobile money was not an overnight success. However, we now have seven years of data....
Singapore-based payment processor CoinPip is introducing new payment options, allowing anyone in the world to send coins via SMS. It integrates seamlessly with the 'SMSwallet' system developed by US-based 37coins, which itself is aimed at developing and emerging markets where access to smartphone and desktop PC apps is limited. It allows consumers to pay in bitcoin via any CoinPip Merchant POS from any mobile device with SMS functionality. Anson Zeall, co-founder of CoinPip, is planning to expand across Hong Kong and Indonesia within the next month or so. His company's vision is to make....
A new service hopes to bring mobile bitcoin payments to the masses. The service, called Bits, has already demonstrated bitcoin payments made via text message from one mobile phone to another. Conceived by Cody Burns, who was a front-end software developer at COG1, a San Francisco-based web and mobile app company, Bits enables payments via SMS, QR codes or tapping together phones with near-field communications (NFC) capabilities. The company promises "almost zero fees" for making and receiving payments, and says payments should be processed in under 10 minutes. This isn't the only service....
Mobile payment methods will replace cash and cards in UK by 2020, according to research by Visa Europe. The study, which was concluded upon the participation of 12,015 European consumers, predicted that the UK markets will stem a whopping £1.2 billion/week, with six in ten Britons expecting to use their mobile device for making payments by the aforementioned year. At present, only one in 12 people use mobile payment methods. "The UK mobile payments boom will see an upsurge in the weekly value spent using mobile devices, with the market growing to an estimated £1.2 billion per week by....