January 14, 2015

Welcome to AppChat, our new regular blog that muses the latest news or developments across the tech, app and digital world. We hope you enjoy it. In this edition, Snapchat and Square team up to create “Snapcash”. So what is all this about Snapcash? Just when you thought Snapchat was only for teenage sexting, and you were still trying to rationalise what Zuckerberg was doing offering $3B on a zero revenue, here today gone tomorrow app… Oh – light bulb! Cool tech, connected community, 100M users, and pent up demand for a seemingly never sorted (or at least adopted) mobile payment solution…partner with the quality b2b payments solution Square… bang – Snapcash. And with more tangible (not temporary) info about the user, you suddenly also have a better ad targeting model for Snapchat too. Seems so obvious now. But despite the huge use of Snapchat, it still has a limited demographic spread and a challenging security perception issue. But they have maybe shown the way to fast forward mobile payments uptake –  tapping into an existing consumer focussed app network, rather than building up a new one with a boring financial services feel. Now back to Zuckerberg. Remember what he bought instead when Snapchat rejected his approaches?  WhatsApp, with 600M users. Oh and Facebook itself has a reasonable consumer focussed penetration with 1.35B users…. FaceWhatCash? Now that might have more chance of success.