Category: Review
Review of MasterCard’s mind boggling PayPass Online service
8th May
To much fanfare MasterCard just launched their new PayPass Online not to be confused with their PayPass Wallet NFC offering.
We’ve packed a whole lot of choice into one ingenious, little button. You see, the PayPass checkout button not only lets you use our PayPass Wallet to checkout quickly and securely, it lets you use any digital wallet offered by a PayPass partner.
I applaud them for trying but unfortunately it is flawed on many different levels. They missed a great opportunity, but they don’t even seem to fix the fundamental security issues in the existing network.
First the good:
OAuth 1.0A
User only enters payment information once
User only enters shipping information once
Example code for Java/.NET/Android/IOS
Partner’s can create their own wallets
Now the very bad:
No OAuth 2
Returns full credit card account to merchant (yes you read right)
Very complex flow
No embedded payment functionality
Reliance on 3rd …
Send bitcoin easily with Coinapult
25th April
PayPal finally took off when they pivoted into their successful email money service. The formula is easy. You can send money to anyone all you need to know is their email address. As long as they are based in one of the blessed countries they can then either sign up for a paypal account or receive the money in an existing account.
BitCoin doesn’t rely on email addresses. Rather accounts are identified by long crypted strings known as addresses.
So what do you do if you want to send money to someone who doesn’t have a Bitcoin wallet and account yet?
Enter Coinapult
With Coinapult you don’t need to sign up at all. All you do is enter the email address of you and a recipient.
Coinapult then creates a new BitCoin address. You transfer the funds you want to send to this address using …
4 ways that Stripe innovated Credit Card payments
17th April
Stripe has quickly become one of the favorite payment gateways for developers. After having gone through a long closed beta period, they launched in September 2011 and immediately grew a large following of users.
The interesting thing about Stripe is that they are famous for being innovative and have a really simple API. The API is only one part of the innovation though:
1. Market to developers
Stripe specifically picked developers as their target audience. They were able to pick at and catch the wave of Developer/Entrepreneurs that has grown in the last couple of years, where most payment systems are targeted at “suits” or small business owners.
Right on their home page Stripe tempts the developer with code they can run right there and then. Simply cut and paste into your terminal.
This might not seam ground breaking, but this is why you hear …
Will Canada’s MintChip take off?
5th April
Imagine my suprise yesterday when all of a sudden the twittersphere was buzzing with news about MintChip the new digital cash system from the Royal Canadian Mint.
I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t at a FC ’98 listening to a presentation by a Dutch grad student on digital cash running on a Java Ring (remember those?).
Anyway while the system has some serious short comings I applaud the RCM’s very bold initiative here.
So what is MintChip exactly?
Basically it’s a combination of a Digital Cash protocol and a MicroSD card containing a secure wallet.
The MintChip site mentions the following benefits:
No personal data is exchanged in the transaction
There is no intermediary or requirement for a proprietary network and as a result MintChip is a cost effective solution to merchants
MintChip is designed to facilitate the payment of low value (e.g. less …
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