AirPay Starts Small, Seeks Feedback on New Mobile Payment System
get what Adams calls some real-world feedback. As an example of its crowd-sourcing approach, AirPay asked a Facebook group of local tech entrepreneurs for advice a few weeks ago on various fonts the company was considering. The company also was working through a few software glitches yesterday, as people attending the party used the AirPay system to buy drinks at Pangea, the Ansir center’s meetup bakery.
“We want people to drive our roadmap, rather than thinking we know better than anyone else,” Adams says.
Adams was a co-founder at San Diego-based Awarepoint, which provides combines wireless technologies with a real-time location system to help hospitals and clinics track medical devices, instruments, and patients. So he has experience in developing the hardware, software, and distribution infrastructure that AirPay needed. He also acknowledges that AirPay faces two significant challenges—persuading consumers to download the app, and persuading merchants to participate.
James Adams
The company generates revenue by charging merchants 1.99 percent of each transaction. AirPay also offers incentives for users to recruit merchants who sign up for the mobile payment service.
“We’re trying to make it really easy for the businesses, so purchases made today are direct-deposited into merchant accounts tomorrow,” Adams says. So far, however, the service is available only in San Diego.
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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