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Can Dwolla Disrupt the Credit Card Industry?

by Rafi Kronzon on February 8, 2012

As a small business owner, I despise the credit card industry. As I’ve written in the past, the charges are ridiculously high for the value of the service (around 2-3% per transaction).

Start-ups have been trying for years to disrupt the credit card industry. Paypal created its own money network that can be tied into your credit card accounts. More recently, Square introduced a merchant service with a flat fee of 2.75%. Other services such as Google Wallet simply store all consumer accounts in one place. None of these really attack the core of the credit card industry because on many transactions, they still pay the credit card company’s interchange fees, which they must pass on to the merchant (me).

Dwolla,  is taking it’s swipe (yuk, yuk) at the heart of the credit card industry. Actually, it’s going after the debit card industry, but I’ll get to that in a minute. To use Dwolla, a consumer must create an account attached to her bank account. The consumer can then make instant payments to merchants that accept Dwolla. The consumer can either manually transfer funds to her Dwolla account (free), or can have it done automatically after each purchase ($3/month) or “borrow” the amount from Dwolla – to be repaid at the end of the billing cycle.

So, who wants Dwolla? For merchants, it’s a slam dunk. Let’s see, should I pay 3% or $0.25 for a transaction?  But for consumers, the picture quickly becomes murky.

  • Anyone that wants to borrow and repay over time can’t use Dwolla. It’s the equivalent of a debit card, not a credit card. This fact shrinks Dwolla’s user base considerably. [click to continue…]
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Is the to-do list really useless?

by Rafi Kronzon on January 25, 2012

To Do list vs CalendarLike many busy people, I keep a running to-do list (I’ve been using Evernote). I have one list for my personal task, and one for my work tasks. The lists never really shrink. It seems that for every “buy new pillows”, there is at least one “give $50 to super for fixing toilet”.

However, I can’t seem to live without it. To me, it serves as a part of the brain that us humans (at least me) have been born without. An area in which we can keep lists of things for months without forgetting them. I need some kind of Faceral Lobe (Facere is latin for “to do”). Maybe in the future we’ll have a chip to add this functionality to our brain, but for right now I need my to-do lists.

So you can imagine my disheartened surprise when I learned from the Harvard Business Review that keeping a to-do list is an exercise in futility. Instead, researchers recommend “Living the Calendar”, which essentially means transferring everything from your to-do list into your calendar to give it a specific deadline and time length.

Personally, I refuse. My to-do lists keep me going, and gives me a sense of control over my life. For most every attack on the to-do list, I’ve got a parry: [click to continue…]

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Starbucks – the Power of Brand

by Rafi Kronzon January 18, 2012 Articles

On an afternoon break, I went up to the Starbucks on 21st street to get a fix of a ridiculously expensive “Misto”, otherwise known as coffee with steamed milk. Across the street, a relatively new place called Greensquare Tavern was giving away free coffee outside. Yes, free. I took these pictures at the same time. [...]

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