I stopped by the launch party late yesterday for AirPay, an early stage startup incubating in San Diego’s Ansir Innovation Center that has been developing a mobile payment system with social media features.
“I have friends who say we’re insane,” says James Adams, the CEO who co-founded AirPay with Web developer Eric Shultz almost two years ago. “They say we’re going up against billion-dollar companies like Google, Foursquare, and PayPal. My response is that nobody has figured it out yet.”
In March, for example, Bloomberg reported that difficulties in getting consumers to embrace its technology had prompted Google to considering changes in its mobile payment strategy, such as sharing revenue with carriers.
Adams describes AirPay as a mobile wallet app that enables users to pay with a smartphone at participating merchants, where they can earn rewards and share their experiences with their friends and family. Users can check in with Foursquare, Twitter, and other social media, write reviews, and invite friends to join them. To pay for a purchase, users display a QR code to a scanning device on the merchant’s counter. For the time being, Adams says AirPay is using a dedicated smartphone because it’s cheaper than developing a more specialized scanner.
AirPay, which has raised $200,000 from four investors, is launching its mobile payment system for Apple’s iOS and Android in part to
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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