Startup Nation: Hackathon Yields a Twitter Payments App
This past weekend Dwolla and Etsy held their first-ever Ecommerce Hack Day at the AlleyNYC in New York’s Fashion District. A report from MyBankTracker identified the winners, and one — Dollarly — deserves notice from Bank Innovation.
The hackathon took place on Saturday and Sunday and had some people coding through the night, according to MyBankTracker. The site said Dwolla and Etsy got more than 800 applications for the hackathon, and eventually whittled down that list to around 225.
Dollarly facilitates transactions through Twitter. Here’s how MyBankTracker described the venture:
First was Dollarly, which took third place and $1,500 in cash. The effort was led by Adam Leibsohn, founder of Voyurl, allowed consumers to sell items via Twitter by sending out a tweet with a unique tag, at which anyone who replied with a corresponding response would be able to complete the purchase using Dwolla, but without having to leave Twitter.
The Dollarly demo was a pretty amazing concept and instantly had us discussing if Twitter would ever consider doing something like this to enter the payment arena. For those of you who are Amex members, you maybe using the closest form of payment Twitter has right now. Our point of view is that Dollarly is far superior and scarier.
Sounds interesting. (See more coverage of the hackathon here.)
It is also worth nothing which financial services companies provided APIs for the effort, which exemplifies more open-minded ventures that are looking to partner and facilitate startups. They were (links are to each venture’s API library):
