Here's the VentureBeat story I was going for when the
Hyperloop video interfered:
Payments company Braintree released a mobile marketplace API today to support the sharing economy.
Braintree powers online and mobile credit card transaction for
e-commerce vendors. Its payment platform makes issuing and accepting
online payments more accessible than before, when payment processing
required extensive infrastructure and resources to set up. Braintree has
many high profile clients that operate marketplaces, such as AirBnB,
Fab, TaskRabbit, Poshmark, and Uber, and saw a high demand for a product
that would simplify how they do commerce.
Braintree’s head of sales James Hyde said that marketplaces present
unique challenges when it comes to payment processing. While Braintree
had an established solution for accepting front-end payments, clients
were asking for technology that extended to the seller side of the
marketplace as well and smoothed the flow of money between both sides....MORE
From our March 2013 post "
The Economist on The Rise of the Sharing Economy":
...The first time I consciously paid attention to this stuff was a January PandO Daily post we linked to in:
"Airbnb’s Brian Chesky: 'It’s Only Day Two in the Sharing Economy'" I commented:
"I'll put this in the 'This might be important but I'm a late adopter' file."
A few days later Izabella Kaminska had the second mention I actually took notice of, a VentureBeat guest post "Will you leave your job to join the sharing economy?" in an FT Alphaville Further Reading post.
And now Alphaville's better bred (but much, much older) sister publication The Economist does a major piece.
I think we got us a meme.
