Episode 141 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Andy White (@arcwhite) from startup incubator Pollenizer on their social payment startup, Pygg. Listen in Your Browser Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: Download this Episode You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link: SitePoint Podcast #141: Pygg with Andy White (MP3, 27:00, 25.9MB) Subscribe to the Podcast The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly. Episode Summary Andy and Louis discuss the challenges of getting a social payment system up and running technically, and getting people to take it up and use it. GA_googleFillSlot("InArticle_728x90_1"); Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/141. Interview Transcript Louis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. My guest on the show this week is a web developer from right here in Australia who’s the technical lead on a very cool little web startup called Pygg, that’s p-y-g-g, Andy White. Hi and welcome to the show, Andy. Andy: Hi, Louis, thank you for having me. Louis: How you doing? Andy: Yeah, good, busy as ever. I’m currently migrating the Pygg service to a new Cloud Hosting environment with another local group, Ninefold, so that’s keeping me up until all hours. Louis: Yeah, were you with EC2 previously? Andy: We have been sort of, the company I work for, Pygg, is part of a startup incubator called Pollenizer, and we’ve used AWS and also Rackspace for a number of projects, Rackspace is Cloud, and we’re trying to rationalize around Ninefold because we target Australian audiences typically with our startups first, and just getting that latency down is a big win. Louis: Yeah. So let’s maybe just back peddle a little bit and talk about what Pygg is. So do you want to just give a little bit of background on what this product is and what it does. Andy: Yeah, sure. So I mean the elevator pitch for Pygg is that we’re trying to disrupt social payments, we’re trying to change the way that people pass money around to one another, and the long term goal is to disrupt the way people interact with their money and interact with their banks. Louis: Cool. Let’s take it down from the elevator pitch to maybe the first floor pitch. Andy: Yep. Louis: Which would be how to use it, what do I do with it. Andy: So the current implementation is that if you have a Twitter or an email account you can signup with Pygg and you can send money to anyone else who has a twitter or an email account. At the moment it’s only in Australia but we do have long term plans to go global. Louis: Right. And you say it’s only in Australia because the way you get money out is to an Australian bank account, right? Andy: That’s right. And dealing with international currency conversion turns out to be quite a complex process when you’re talking about if I as a user pay you one U.S. dollar what does that mean when you receive it and how do we actually present that to the user in terms of the interface and the messaging. We tried an early experiment around that and it got very complicated very quickly, so our strategy has been to work on the Australian market first while we’re proving the idea, and once we’ve really got our legs underneath us then we’ll jump off and look at potentially the U.S. market or somewhere else. Louis: Right. So the idea here is I send a tweet to Pygg or do I send a tweet out into the open or to the person I’m sending the money to in theory? Andy: So, we run a Pygg account @pygg, p-y-g-g, and there’s a bit of code that sits there an listens to Twitter on that account, you send a tweet [...]