Clinkle Wants To Become Your Wallet

vikingpower writes "Clinkle, a new mobile payments start-up, may or may not have succeeded where so many other efforts have fizzled by inventing a practical way to replace credit cards with smartphones. It's hard to say, though, since Clinkle won't say much about how its system works. Its website is, well ... slight. But a prominent group of Silicon Valley investors who do know what Clinkle is cooking up are acting as though it has achieved a breakthrough. On Thursday, Clinkle announced that it had raised $25 million in early financing from Accel Partners; Andreessen Horowitz; Intel; Intuit; Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com; Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal; and a long list of other investors with technology industry pedigrees. The Huffington Post has an article on Clinkle, or rather on Stanford students putting their degree on hold to go work at Clinkle. The Wall Street Journal [paywalled] mentions Clinkle having some 30-odd employees already."

Comments

Direct Withdrawal

[Animats]

"Creates a direct connection between your wallet and our bank account."

Re:Direct Withdrawal

[Joe_Dragon]

so you can out of your funds for the time it takes to fix an error.

also hackers will love this.

30-odd employees

[frovingslosh]

The Wall Street Journal mentions Clinkle having some 30-odd employees already.

But how many normal employees do they have?

And why exactly would I want a product where I have to provide my own terminal to run their code and use my own capped data to support their service? Can't imagine any benefit to the actual consumer over just using my plastic card.

Nice Idea

[RedHackTea]

if done right. You go to restaurant. Get receipt. Create a one-off closed account with user ID and one-off GUID with exactly the amount of receipt+tip transferred from your actual bank account. Unlike with a card, you just hand the server the user ID+GUID. They never know your full name and credit card number. They can't swap your card with an imposter (plenty of cases where servers will do this if have a similar looking card). If they do decide malicious intent or accidentally mix up your GUID with another, then there is no problem; all that is in the temporary "account" is the exact money. The only thing that will tie them to your accounts is the user ID, and that will not be your direct online banking account, etc.; it will be the (Clinkle's) service. This is just a pipe dream of course, and I'm sure Clinkle's service is more open so that restaurants/etc. don't have to buy new hardware/software; it's probably only a fraction safer than actually giving your plastic card.

Re:Nice Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I would only start to be comfortable with this if they licensed their software to banks and let banks keep the records.

The scenario you describe has a gaping privacy hole in that Clinkle will have records of all your purchases. One national security letter or weakly anonymized marketing datbase sale later, and you're screwed.

Banks, at least, already have this information, so we're no worse off; and, banking as a whole is more strongly regulated than valley startups.

Re:Nice Idea

[tftp]

You go to restaurant. Get receipt. Create a one-off closed account with user ID and one-off GUID with exactly the amount of receipt+tip transferred from your actual bank account. Unlike with a card, you just hand the server the user ID+GUID. They never know your full name and credit card number.

Or, if you are not one of those thirty "odd employees," you just pay with cash. Or you use a temporary c/c number with limited funds - many banks offer this service for free. Or you walk with the server to the payment terminal. There are several ways to pay that do not involve a third party.

This whole thing is designed to appeal to geeks who enjoy fiddling with computers. However everyone else will find it bothersome. It is just another step where you can make a mistake. All those eWallet companies are solving a problem that does not exist for the vast majority of people - and even to some geeks. I, personally, have no need of that service. I also have no desire to include another set of crooks into the payment chain.

I'm sure Clinkle's service is more open so that restaurants/etc. don't have to buy new hardware/software; it's probably only a fraction safer than actually giving your plastic card.

Where would these numbers go that a patron hands over to the server? Do they just type it into a browser, in a place where thousands of patrons and workers come and go every single day? It only takes a record in the HOSTS file, and a self-signed certificate, to impersonate the service. Businesses pay for secure terminals because they are secure. A mere computer in a corner cannot be called secure, if all it takes to compromise is to insert a USB stick and run a script.

Alternatively...

[fahrbot-bot]

You know what else works just as well as a credit card that is way smaller and lighter than a cell phone, never needs recharging, works literally everywhere and already has proven, well-established limited liability for theft? A fucking credit card.

Oh, and nice analysis editor:

Clinkle, a new mobile payments start-up, may or may not have succeeded ...

Go to Hell, Clinkle

[nukenerd]

I followed the link to their website and the first thing up is their demand my email address. WTF? I cannot just browse their site without them demanding my email?

Next thing, they demand I upgrade my browser. That's my business; it's their business to design their website to use HTML standards.

Do these jerks seriously expect people to sign on after a start like that?

Re:Go to Hell, Clinkle

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot just browse their site without them demanding my email?

The catch is they don't even have a web site yet. Just a steadily growing mailing list that they'll send out progress reports to until they get a working product. Why on earth anyone would ever sign up for one, I have no idea. But that's what it is.

Next thing, they demand I upgrade my browser. That's my business; it's their business to design their website to use HTML standards.

It's part of the Silicon Valley startup douchebag mindset. They're innovators. They're moving forward. They are progress. They don't want to be tied down to legacy modes and archaic systems. In other words, they have no concept of graceful fallback and only design for their friends using whatever-the-fuck-Google-calls-Chrome-beta-these-days.

Do these jerks seriously expect people to sign on after a start like that?

Some of them probably do, but they really don't care. All they need is something to show a VC (who is, of course, running Chrome beta on a macbook pro), so that the VC thinks "Hey, some hypothetical people somewhere might find that really cool!". Then they need to say that a shitload of people signed up to hear about updates and present it on a nice hockey stick graph. Then they sit around writing blog posts, attending seminars, having lunch with other forward-thinking, progressive innovators while one of those starry eyed college students code monkeys up a prototype in jQuery cobbled together from bits of Stack Overflow. The idea is that sometime before the other shoe drops they'll be able to sell themselves to Yahoo! or Google (who have to buy out of fear that they've actually built something), rinse and repeat.

Re:The problem with credit cards is...

[DNS-and-BIND]

Cash is dirty, having been in hands of lowest castes of the society, and it may carry diseases.

What the fuck? Did you just actually say that? What sort of bullshit is this? Are you a time traveler from India circa 1840, or are you just a ignorant, bigoted prick?