Eduardo Saverin (born March 19, 1982 in São Paulo, Brazil) is a Brazilian-American entrepreneur and co-founder of Facebook, along with Mark Zuckerberg and others. It is unknown how many shares Saverin owns in Facebook since it is not a publicly traded company; however journalist Allison Kade speculated that Saverin might have 5%, worth about US$2.5 billion as of January 4, 2011.
Saverin is not anymore with FB but does still get media attention. He recently did invest in two start ups. Jumio and Qwiki.
Qwiki is a kind of multimedia Wikipedia. I signed up for it a few months ago, but can't get really excited yet. However Qwiki has an new interesting approach to search and display the web.
Jumio is a start up which claims to change the mobile payment, which is time, because neither the credit card companies nor paypal do right now a good job with mobile payment and this will be the future. Different than Qwiki the website of Jumio does not give a lot of information. They uploaded today a short video, and it seems that cash and credit cards are the past. This means your phone is the middle of payments.
Saverin is 29 years old and was one of the Facebook founders, but is this reason alone to watch out to companies he is investing?
Yes it is. Not because he might be a genius, but because he is a new generation of investors and influencer. He is of course only an influencer because of the success of FB, but this enough.
I as well think the Internet will change. We are all more visual from nature than we want to read. The bandwidth and speed is now almost there that webpages don't need to be text heavy anymore. And in the time of 24/7 online, cash is not always the first choice anymore. At the same time, carrying credit cards is not necessary when you have your phone with you. As an example I use my iPhone to pay my Starbucks coffee. His understanding of the future is similar to mine, but of course I am not famous or rich enough to influence this.
And older people with influence do not always understands what the youth from today want to have tomorrow. I understand there are situations today where cash is important. There is one thing electronic payment can't provide. This is income not recognized by federal tax. You can ask any bartender and they will tell you, that they prefer to get tip in cash. If it is cash it does not exist for our government. This is a strong argument. Therefore for certain situation we might want to have cash, but otherwise there is no reason to carry more than your smart phone. I can imagine that even the driver license will be at some point a part of your smart phone.
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NFC will be rolling out over the next year which will extend the existing payment operators' reach into the mobile arena. Unless PayPal does something special it's going to be left behind and the iTunes system will take its place.
ReplyDeleteYou might be interested in what Jack Dorsey (twitter cofounder) is up to with Square. He didn't wait around for the phones to develop payment identities, choosing to develop his own hardware instead. I like the concept but I have doubts that it'll reach critical mass before NFC handsets are commonplace.