There will soon be two more ways to use your phone instead of your wallet to pay back your friends for dinner. Two new startups offering person-to-person payment functionality have appeared on the scene: Paidly and Cashtag. Neither is yet available — Paidly is set to launch within six months, while Cashtag, founded last July, has no date set. For differentiation in this crowded field, Paidly will rely on simplicity and the use of multiple currencies including bitcoins, while Cashtag is betting on using efficient payment rails and social media. P2P functionality is becoming commonplace in mobile banking apps, so why might users choose these apps rather than using their banks’ functionality? Paidly is a product from entrepreneur Pranay Shah and offers payments in “three simple steps.” (The third step, the company says, is drooling over how easy the first two steps were.) Users pay a one-time fee of .01 bitcoins — about $1.23 at the moment — to use the service and can make payments in a number of different currencies. The service will also offer military-grade encryption with SSL/TSL and multi-factor authentication and is expected to be released in “a maximum of six months.” Cashtag, as its name implies, relies [...]
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