Social Payment - Part 2

As we pursue our goal of moving the Social Web forward, Ringside is focusing on two things. First to enable websites with user communities to become socially enabled. Second, to enable applications to become socially enabled.

As we had previewed a month or so ago, one of the applications we are trying to socially enable is Payment. One of our great developers, Brian Robinson, has done a video showing the current progress of this project - http://wiki.ringsidenetworks.org/display/ringside/Payment+Services. We are now to the point where we are looking for early customers to collaborate with on deploying this technology and integrating it into their existing infrastructure.

There are three interesting elements that I will highlight:

1. The payment service is designed to work across websites and social networks. In this example, premium sports content is available to users on the SportsNet website as well as Facebook and MySpace.

2. The social payment service provides companies a variety of ways to create different offerings to customers that can expand their business and distribution. The basic concept is that it is simple to add friends to a service. This screen shot shows how a user can select friends from their social network to share the premium sports service with. In the example we are showing, the original user was offered a basic offering for himself at $6.95 per month, or a service that would be for himself as well as up to 3 friends for $9.95.






3. We have designed the Social Payment Service to connect with any backend payment gateways (like Authorize.Net, PayPal or Google Check-Out) or billing services (like Aria, Zuora or LeCayla). This means it is flexible and can be integrated with any existing website’s existing e-commerce capabilities.

Let us know if you have ideas for enabling your company for the Social Web.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi Bob. Hope you are doing well. It is not clear from this post what you mean by social payment. Are you talking about group discounts? It sounds interesting but would like to make sure that I get it.
August 9, 2008 at 9:01 PM
Bob said…
You can think of it as user adminstered group discounts I guess, that makes it easy for that user to pay for services or goods for themselves and a group of firends, family or associates. There are a ton of different use cases and ways to utilize this capability - one of the reasons we are looking for some real life implementation partners...
August 9, 2008 at 10:03 PM
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