The Payment Revolution

Perhaps the most ignored aspect of running online services is payment. We all take for granted the smug Visa/Mastercard duopoly, with Paypal having a dominance of online payment.

Down the years I've worked with, or tried to work with, pretty much every payment providing service and system out there, and it's been a huge frustration that something so simple is made so complex.

In Africa people have been using mobile phones to do their banking for nearly a decade, and finally Barclays have launched a similar service in the UK called Pingit. Paypal, of course, have had a mobile app for some time.

Meanwhile, in the us, Stripe has been working on simplifying the whole process of integrating payment into a website, where Paypal again has a clear lead. And they seem to have struck on a good formula, although their product is aimed at developers not WordPress users.

Now, launching a solution to protects trademarked content is something that many have tried and largely failed.

Apart, of course, for Apple, who are profiting handsomely from thinking through the payment problem for copyrighted products better than anyone else.