Tag: social media

Oxygen has now launched its smartphone payments app service that provides users a new way to pay and get paid.

Provider of payment solutions, Oxygen, has now announced the launch of its mobile wallet service, called the Oxygen Wallet, which provides users the ability to transfer money and buy gifts for family and friends with whom they are connected over social networks.

This service can also be used for bill payments, refilling cell phone service accounts, and shopping.

According to the chairman and managing director of Oxygen, Pramod Saxena, “Ours is the country’s first social mobile wallet service through which people can share money with their friends and family over their preferred social networks and messaging platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Google+, and Twitter.”

It is expected that the top users of this mobile wallet will be youth when they want to split bills with friends.

The service will give these individuals the chance to send smaller but frequent amounts of money or gifts to their friends. When they head to restaurants and they want to split the bill, they can easily transfer their share of the total to the individual who has covered the whole thing.

Saxena explained that they will be able to use the Oxygen Wallet to be able to pay their bills, to make payments on mobile commerce sites such as when purchasing movie tickets, to pay for pizza orders, to make travel ticket bookings, to pay for movie and music downloads, and to pay for their mobile service charges.

He added that “Oxigen now sees the opportunity to leverage the social connect to India’s 900 million mobile users and 100 million Facebook accounts, where the youth is rapidly adopting social media apps like WhatsApp, Twitter etc.”

The mobile wallet apps is now available on both the Google Play Store and on the Apple Store. According to Saxena, it gives users the ability to be able to send funds to their connections through their favorite social media channels without ever having to actually share any of the information about their own bank account or about the accounts of the recipient.

CardSpring is purchased by the massively popular social networking service.

Twitter has announced that it has bought CardSpring – an application platform with a simple API that enables developers to connect digital apps to debit or credit cards – and the social networking giant believes that the payments company will help it provide card-linked offers to consumers, which could help boost its social commerce.

CardSpring is well known for its easy-to-use application programming interface (API).

Commenting on the recent acquisition, CardSpring stated in a blog post that “At Twitter, we will continue to grow the adoption of our platform and work with our publisher, financial, and retail partners to create new, innovative commerce experiences for consumers.”

Twitter has previously provided its users with the ability to obtain discounts and deals. According to Twitter, users can already “surprise someone with a coffee, or even add items to their online shopping cart – all directly from a Tweet.” The company stated that as they work on its commerce future, they are confident that CardSpring and the technology it has developed will be a “great fit”.

There are different ways that Twitter could use CardSpring. As an example, it could use it to allow card-linked offers. For instance, a user could receive a tweet from a merchant containing a discount, which would ask the user to enter their credit card number. Later, when the user makes a purchase from this merchant either in-store or online, CardSpring would recognize the credit card number and automatically apply the discount.

At the same time, it would provide the merchant with performance analytics of their offer. Thus, these types of promotions could increase Twitter’s relevancy to local businesses interested in boosting their in-store sales and not just their follows and retweets.

The recent acquisition could lead to a brighter social commerce future for Twitter over Facebook.

Prior to Twitter’s announcement, Facebook revealed it had begun testing its Buy button, which allows online shoppers to buy goods and services directly from their News Feed. However, the one major social commerce advantage that Twitter may have over its competitor is its retweet feature. On Facebook, users can click “Like” on a post and they can also “Share” it, but a retweet immediately shares a message to all of that user’s followers. In other words, it gives merchants a much greater chance of growing their customer base because retweets are likely to reach more users and re-sharing is a huge part of the Twitter culture.