TechCrunch
Coinbase Removes 1% Merchant Fee For First $1 Million In Orders
Coinbase unveiled another incentive for merchants to start accepting Bitcoins. Starting today, payment processing is now free for everyone for your first $1 million in orders. After that, the regular 1 percent fee kicks in. While Bitcoin payment is still a novelty, removing the processing fee makes it a compelling alternative compared to PayPal’s fee (2.9 percent + $0.30 per transaction).
Coinbase provides all the tools you need to accept payments on your website. The API allows you to easily integrate Coinbase’s checkout screen into your website’s workflow. In other words, from the user’s standpoint, it makes paying in Bitcoins as easy as paying with PayPal, Amazon Payments or Google Wallet.
The company currently supports one-time payments, donations and recurring subscriptions. And if you don’t have Bitcoins on your account, Coinbase uses your regular bank account to purchase Bitcoins and pay for the transaction. Reddit and OkCupid already use Coinbase to process Bitcoins.
The two other advantages of accepting Bitcoin payments is that there’s no chargeback and transactions are instantaneous — a Bitcoin is just a chain of characters. Removing the merchant fee will appeal to merchants who handle micro transactions, as fees can add up pretty quickly when you take into account PayPal’s $0.30 flat fee.
There’s a catch. If you want to exchange your Bitcoins into USD, EUR or any local currency, you’ll have to pay 1 percent + $0.15 per transaction. It is still a lot cheaper than PayPal, but you have to take this into account. This is a non-issue if you’re ready to keep Bitcoins in your Coinbase account and use it for Bitcoin payments, but many high-profile websites will probably want to exchange their Bitcoins to reinvest the money.
One last thing to take into account: The value of a Bitcoin changes a lot over time due to volatility. And of course, it is still a very marginal currency. Before breaking the $1 million barrier, you’ll have to wait a long time. That’s what Coinbase wants you to think. Why wouldn’t you try Bitcoin payments on your website? Now it’s free.
BlackBerry Reportedly Considering Turning BBM Into Spinoff Subsidiary, Which Explains Cross-Platform Launch
In a move that should surprise exactly no one, BlackBerry is said to be thinking about spinning off BBM into its own subsidiary company called BBM Inc., says the Wall Street Journal. As BlackBerry faces the prospect of potentially having to part out its more valuable assets for sale, BBM is a natural opportunity that comes to mind, and the recent decision to take the messaging platform to both iOS and Android makes a lot more sense once you consider that a means of fluffing the brand prior to a potential sale.
Giving away the proprietary mojo of BBM made little to no sense if you didn’t consider this one of BlackBerry’s strategic plans down the road; the company has long-touted BBM as one of the primary reasons that people come to and stay faithful to BlackBerry. If you give them the opportunity to take BBM with them, there’s one less barrier to switching.
You can make the argument that BlackBerry has more to gain by encouraging BBM network growth once it starts offering stuff on multiple platforms, including ones that don’t have fast-dwindling user bases, and that it stands to gain additional revenue from those users via marketing or potential commercial services made available to BBM in the future. But the real reason to open up BBM is to put some shine on the apple at this stage of the game; accomplishing the kind of growth needed to make BBM a sustainable business would be tough in the face of the WhatsApps, LiNEs, and Kiks of the world, but you can still inject a fair amount of value for a prospective buyer by offering something that is platform agnostic.
BBM currently has around 60 million users, which is nothing to sneeze at even if it trails other messaging platforms. BlackBerry is also experimenting with one-to-many broadcasting via BBM Channels, and the WSJ says it’s looking into building desktop apps as well. The report also states that a cross-platform BBM has been tested internally for as long as three years, which means this was definitely held back as a last resort until it was clear BlackBerry-only BBM wasn’t going to mount a return to positive growth.
Martini Media Raises $14M To Target Ads At Rich People
Twenty-five percent of the population controls 75 percent of the spending, and advertisers will pay big bucks to advertise to find them. That’s Martini Media‘s job. This focus and the $22 million to $27 million it expects to earn in 2013 has helped it raise a $14 million Series D. Now it’s ready to build a programmatic self-serve way to pepper the upper crust with ads.
Martini started back in 2008, incubated by Bedrock, and was focused on reaching affluents (people making over $100,000 a year) since the beginning. COO and CFO Erik Pavelka tells me “This audience was underserved in so many ways.”
Martini’s solution is technology that sniffs out affluent people on the web. It leans heavily on the IAB Rising Star ad units that can be reduced in size by viewers. It also uses interactive ad units that can pull in Twitter feeds, video content and more.
Today it handles most of its clients, including Audi, American Express, Chase, and Emirates Airlines, on a managed spend basis, but its business is moving toward programmatic self-serve ad buying. It works with 300 different publishers and about 1,000 sites like Forbes, Tennis.com, Wall Street Cheat Sheet, and Salon to place its ads.
But like a railroad Barron eying the old west, Martini dreams of something bigger. Right now it’s only targeting the 100 million affluent people in the US and Europe.
So the company has raised a total of $20 million, with this new $14 million Series D round led by long-time Martini investors Venrock, Granite Ventures, Reed Elsevier Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank. The money will fund technology enhancements for its self-serve tool and international expansion. “This investment to create technology will allow us to scale geographically and culturally to the remaining 350 million affluent worldwide,” Martini CEO Skip Brand tells me.
“2013 is a year of reinvesting” says Pavelka. “In 2014 it will be a combination, but we’ll definitely see profitability in 2014.” While it’s already on its D round, the company isn’t planning on going public anytime soon. “An IPO is something I’d love to see in the future, but at the same time I’m a realist and understand some of the inherent challenges of the public market. It’s something I’m not considering in the near term,” says Martini’s CEO.
In the meantime, it will keep selling lifestyle to the rich and famous with a lot more cash in its own pocket.
BitTorrent's File Synchronizing Service Sync, Still In Beta, Launches As An iOS App
BitTorrent, which years ago first made its name as an efficient distribution network for music and video (sometimes not for the most legit of ends), has been of late positioning itself as a distribution service for everything, and today it’s adding two more strings to that bow: it’s launching Sync, its file synchronizing service, as an iOS app, and it is adding support for 10 languages beyond English. As with before, Sync remains a free service, although the company is getting closer to working out how to monetize it as a premium service for enterprises as well.
Since launching Sync in beta and as an Android app just over a month ago), BitTorrent tells me that the service has seen some strong take-up. “We are closing in on 14 petabytes synced since the open alpha in April,” a spokesperson tells me. “We were at 8 petabytes in July when we moved into beta.”
The iOS app will let users move big files between devices, not unlike what you do with Dropbox, Bitcasa and other cloud-based storage systems — except that BitTorrent’s P2P distribution architecture means that nothing is “stored” in any cloud that can be accessed.
You can use it to back up photos from your iPhone to your laptop, or use it to send files from you iPad to your home computer. As with the desktop and Android versions, there is no file size limit. In a sense, adding the iOS support is a natural extension of the original premise of Sync: being able to access your data regardless of device or location.
In terms of new language support, the 10 getting added today are German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal). Adding them in early-doors, while the product is still in beta, underscores the fact that BitTorrent as a brand has long had a loyal group of users worldwide.
But while the company plans to monetize the service longer term, it’s still holding back on that for now.
“The basic features of BitTorrent Sync will always be free of charge,” the spokesperson says. “[But] we are exploring potential business models which may include premium features to address certain applications. For example, enterprise, where we have the potential to offer significant cost savings and added security and speed benefits.”
There is no timing yet for premium features, he says, but notes that the company is in “closed discussions” with a few potential companies that might either help BitTorrent sell or build them out. “It’s too early to say what direction these will take. We are interested in hearing from people about how what premium features they would like to see and how BitTorrent Sync would be helpful to them in say the enterprise setting,” he says. Until BitTorrent formally announces anything, it looks like the best channel for feedback about this idea is through its Sync forums.
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