NFC and ShopSavvy

Recently we launched QuickPay, our integrated wallet, into ShopSavvy. QuickPay 1.0 only supports payments using your PayPal account today, but QuickPay 2.0 will allow you to use PayPal AND any credit card you wish (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover). Our goal is to allow you to buy products from retailers with a single tap on your touch screen – add a PIN – and you are able to purchase the product and have it shipped to your house without pulling out your wallet. Think of it as iTunes for everything else. While QuickPay can support ‘pick up in store’ it is really a tool for offline to online purchase conversion, but that is all about to change with NFC support.

QuickPay 2.0 will support local point of sale purchases through the support of NFC or near field communication. NFC is a short-range (4 inches) wireless connection that is compatible with existing ‘contactless’ infrastructure already in use for payments. ShopSavvy users who have set up their QuickPay wallet (with one or more credit cards or bank accounts) will be able to use their phone to purchase products (and even services) from retailers who have NFC readers integrated int heir point of sale systems. Users who leverage ShopSavvy’s integrated wallet will benefit from special offers such as coupons, instant rebates as well as a 1% cash back rewards for purchases. Our objective with QuickPay is to create a very flexible wallet that enables augmented payments using any payment method (credit card, debit card, ACH or online payment) in any setting (online or local).

Palm webOS SDK has arrived!

We get emails every week asking us when ShopSavvy is coming to the Palm Pre. The Pre was released last month but all 3rd party application development has been on-hold because developers have not had the access to the SDK required to build apps. We finally got the word this week that the SDK was ready for prime time.

From the email we received it sounded like they were making sure that everything was going to be rock solid for the developers.

I want to thank you for your patience while we allowed a few developers to kick the tires on our APIs, tools and docs before we released them to the rest of the world. We’re working hard to ensure that Palm webOS becomes a world-class platform for scan app iphone development, but we need to do so in a measured and focused way so we can be sure we’re providing a great development experience and attentive developer support. Palm may be playing catch-up but making it easy for developers to create is always a good thing. I know that our team is ready to get their hands on this.

Boosting up the bandwidth at ShopSavvy

With more than 7.5 million Americans counting on ShopSavvy we decided we needed to a) increase our IP bandwidth AND b) improve our redundancy. To that end we have added two IP connections in our data center that use different physical and logical routes to reach the internet. Our new fiber optic connections mean that even if a road crew digs up our first connection our backup connection will keep us running as normal until the first is repaired. Of course even if a second road crew were to dig up the OTHER connection we still have our backup servers/connections in the cloud at Amazon.

None