Bitpass was an online payment system for digital content and services. Kurt Huang was a co-founder. Doug Knopper was hired as CEO in November, 2005. Bitpass was a California corporation with headquarters in Silicon Valley. It was founded in December, 2002 and partnered with major technology and financial services companies such as Microsoft, Paypal, the Royal Bank of Scotland and First Data.
On January 19th 2007, Bitpass announced that they were shutting down, and operations officially closed on January 26th 2007. No immediate reason for closure was given.For the content buyer, Bitpass worked like a pre-paid telephone card: the buyer signed up for the service and put money into an account using a credit card or Paypal. This stored-valued amount could be used to purchase digital content or services.
Transaction fees were paid by the content provider. For payments under $5, the charge was 15% of the price paid by the buyer (Bitpass Professional merchant account fee).
There was a person named Winnie who worked for Bitpass before said that Bitpass was actually making pretty good money until stakeholders who were funding them pressured them to get out of the adult content business, neglect indeed content creators and spend all of their resources on going after big media.
Winnie further said that it was conceivable that a micropayments company that is allowed to grow organically can succeed, but when investors are knocking at your door offering tens of millions of dollars, it is very hard to resist selling out. 
No comments:
Post a Comment