We are, I believe, in an interstitial zone when it comes to payments. Credit cards are still king – just ask Square – and NFC is just a dream in most countries. That’s why Coin is so interesting. It’s a credit card-sized device that holds other credit cards, allowing you to swap from card to card and even store gift cards inside its ultra thin innards. The company planned a pre-order campaign that would top out at $50,000. They blew past that goal in forty minutes today, a testament to the desire for folks to leave their plastic at home. The card itself is as thin as a regular credit card. I saw the near-final prototype and except for a raised button and a small (slightly unreadable) LCD. To use the card you select a payment type with the button and just swipe. The Coin card “mimics” your read credit or gift card. The technology is tightly packed inside the card’s plastic case. The card uses low-power Bluetooth to connect to your iOS device that is coupled with a standard credit card reader. You swipe your cards into the system and you’re done. The device holds up to eight cards. Engineer Kanishk Parashar is leading the Y-Combinator-backed company alongside investor and board member Manu Kumar . Parashar cut his teeth in payments with a startup called SmartMarket but this product seems to be his winner. The company isn’t new – a company called Flint is already in this space and I suspect a bigger player will probably beat Coin to the mass market. However, it’s a cool idea in a cool package and, clearly, the idea has caught fire. You can take a look at the product here and it ships this Summer.
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Coin, The Electronic Credit Card, Reaches Its Pre-Order Goal In 40 Minutes
An anonymous reader writes “A Chinese Bitcoin exchange has vanished without trace, taking more than $4 million of the virtual currency with it and leaving profit-hungry investors out of pocket. GBL, the Chinese Bitcoin exchange was launched in May 2013 and putatively based in Hong Kong, despite its servers being registered in Beijing. However GBL’s Hong Kong offices do not exist. GBL mysteriously disappeared in early November taking an estimated $4.1m (£2.6m) of Bitcoins with it.” (Beware the auto-playing ads, with sound.) Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Facebook updated its Graph Search feature today to include posts and status updates. Now, you can find posts your friends have made about certain topics, from specific locations, or that you’ve commented on. Check out Facebook’s full blog post for more info, as well as our favorite clever uses for Graph Search . Read more… 
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iComp sends this quote from El Reg: “PayPal, Google Wallet and other online payment systems face higher transaction fees from MasterCard in retaliation for their refusal to share data on what people are spending. Visa is likely to follow suit. The amount that PayPal has to pay MasterCard for every transaction will go up as the latter introduces new charges for intermediated payment processors. This change is on the grounds that such processors don’t share transaction details, which the card giants would love to get hold of as it can be used to research buying patterns and the like. Companies such as PayPal allow payments between users, so the party (perhaps a merchant) receiving the money doesn’t need to be registered with the credit-card company. PayPal collects the dosh from the payer’s card, and deducts a processing fee before passing the cash on to the receiving party. MasterCard would prefer the receiver to be registered directly so will apply the new fee from June to any payment that is staged in this way.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 