FB has but to do one thing to remain king of the heap and that is to maintain focus. The more junk they add to the site, the more ads, games, stupid apps (find out who's stalking you!) the uglier and more MySpace-like it becomes. FB succeeded in large part because it refused to be everything to everyone and become uglier. That said, the experience I get viewing my FB feed is aesthetically less pleasing as the months go on.
G+ OTOH is the new, shiny, clean kid on the block and my feeds are still pristine.
If FB continues on the path they are on the influential thought leaders who hate clutter will completely leave for G+ and that will be the beginning of the end of FB.
Would G clutter up G+ with junk? Not likely. They LOVE all that more detailed info you're voluntarily giving them that they can then serve up tailored (revenue-generating) ads on your Gmail, searches, partner sites, etc.
When you resort to callous language you demonstrate a lack of creativity.
There's an energy drink company up here in Canada with some rather terrible ads but one thing I do like is their tagline:
"No Caffeine. No Caffeine Crash. No Bull"
That works on two levels. 1) Obviously they're hitting on what you're hitting (No BS) and 2) A dig at the leading energy drink Red Bull.
I think a better idea for you would be to aim for a positive message (not a negative).
- They Compete. You Win. Right On! (cute)
- Better. Cheaper. Win-Win! (more accurate)
- They Compete. You Decide. (play on Fox News and puts power in consumer's hand which is what they want)
Or what if your third part of the tagline rotated so that each time the screen refreshed it changed to another awesome final point? That would grab attention.
I chided the folks at Gandi for their "no bullshit" tagline, thinking it uncultured at best. They sent me a thoughtful response, saying that they'd weighed the possibility that it would be considered crude, but that it was a clear description of their corporate mission.
Erm... no. Apple announcing iCloud is kinda like Palm announcing WebOS a couple of years ago, streaming music from LastFM (though iCloud doesn't stream), getting your pics up and down from Flickr, and working on GDocs/Gmail/GCal/Office365.
Windows is an OS. iOS is an OS. Mac OSX is an OS. The iCloud service is designed to allow you to shuffle from one to the other seamlessly but not to replace those machines altogether. Kinda like using dropbox.
Now, is the OS becoming less important in comparison to the services available? Absolutely. Not for everyone but for the average user it certainly is. Will iCloud suceed? Surely it will, but only for those who wish to be tied into Apple products (unless I am mistaken and you will be able to share iCloud uploads with Android or WP devices).
Would a company such as Facebook even want to go solo in being a credit provider? I don't see it. I do see them partnering with one of the big credit providers to create a FBCard. Then they could say that to use or purchase FBCredits you must use the FBCard which would also be a normal Visa/MC which could be used in any regular bricks and mortar place (with FBCredit rewards?) Imagine the data mining they could do on that! Now you have a FB user buying FBCredits for games/whatever AND they know what restaurants you frequent, what groceries you buy, if you smoke or not, etc., etc. And they would be able to do it all without the hassle of setting up their own credit department and collections issues. And they could probably do it so that a parent could sign up their under 18 kids for the card so the CC companies would love to get in to that market!
Square was my first thought, too. Yes, they could most certainly take on MC/Visa/Amex/etc. Maybe that is why Visa invested in Square? You have to get the POS units into retailer's hands. Then, at the same time, you have to get consumers using it. Where square differentiates themselves from the competition is that they make it very easy for anyone to become a POS node.
Now, the difference between Square and the CC companies is that square is really a gateway to those CC systems and not a credit provider themsleves... BUT once they have traction with POS merchants and acceptance by consumers could they start their own credit department? Sure. Would they want to? That is another debate. I'd wager it's much easier and still very profitable to be a gateway taking a small slice off each transaction than it is to be the credit provider.
I have to admit, when I heard of Remembary I though... huh, that sounds like Momento. Doing a quick search of Remembary vs Momento immediately brought me to this post. Then I read how Andrew Burke, Remembary's developer, handled the same news. It was great to not only see him distinguish what makes his app attractive but also recognize the strengths of the competition (and where it would suit his potential customer's needs more).
Hey! That's awesome! Thanks for coming back and letting us all know how you did and that I played a small part in it. (small as in that was one tiny blurb I mentioned and all the hard work was done by you alone). It made my day to read that.
At 5.9%+$0.95 or 8.9% flat? Good luck with that. Unless you can explain to me why anyone would be willing to pay near double what anywhere charges... Seriously, your site doesn't explain this well. Why do you charge near double (or even triple on the flat rate)?
Regarding pricing, it's true there are less expensive-appearing services (though don't forget that without SaaSy handling everything for you you'd still have to pay 3.5-4% in e-commerce merchant fees for every order, once you factor in the true costs), but they end up costing you far more when you factor in software development costs and the years you will spend if you go it alone or use an existing basic service that appears to cost less. Remember, it's not just building what you think you need today, it's also adding on to it endlessly as your needs grow and change, and then there's the maintenance. That's just the tech development side, what about dealing with taxes, say in the EU if you have any EU customers, or a dozen other similar issues you'd otherwise be on your own to figure out and then develop a solution for? Take a look at this matrix to see what the cheaper, more basic solutions are missing that SaaSy provides for those launching or running existing SaaS businesses, and you'll see why SaaSy is actually quite a deal relative to the basic recurring billing services:
http://saasy.com/matrix.php
In addition to saving you all the time, money, and hassle of building your own e-commerce system, the incremental profit you'll earn from utilizing our features for growing your average order size, lifetime value, and optimizing your conversion rate far outweigh the higher fees. Each feature you take advantage of can increase your revenue by a few percent, and it doesn't take too many increases of 2-4% here and there to add up to an overall profit improvement that far outweighs the few extra points that Saasy's all-in-one service costs. For example, cross-selling; upselling; add-ons; bundling; discounts & promotions; order pages in local currencies and languages; Facebook/Twitter referral management; a breadth of payment methods available for your customers; an order page customized to fit the rest of your site or designed to fit your preferences; the ability to test and tweak different order page structures and merchandising ideas; reseller management; analytics; outside help with PPC, SEO, affiliate, and general web marketing; fraud protection, and the list goes on. And then there's the impact our phenomenal customer service will have on your churn rate and the word-of-mouth sales it generates to have so many "wowed" end users out there talking up the customer experience of working with you. SaaSy also reduces your internal support expenses as they relate to order and payment customer support, since we handle that for you.
If you're up for spending up to a couple of years building and improving on an e-commerce infrastructure, SaaSy isn't for you. But if time to market is important and you'd rather focus on developing your product/service and doing sales and marketing instead of dealing with the distracting complexities of building your own e-commerce system either from scratch or by building all the needed functionality around one of the cheaper, more basic solutions, then you'll want to take a close look at SaaSy.
When you view our features list and the competitive matrix, think through the costs of developing your own infrastructure over the next few years vs. what your development team could instead be focusing on, factor in that you're not going to need to pay the 3.5-4% in e-commerce merchant fees for every order which you would be doing otherwise, consider not only the reduced expenses but the new revenue you'll now be able to generate, and you'll start to see why our rates are actually quite a deal, saving you money, helping you to significantly grow your revenue and to thrive relative to your competitors.
Wow! The glowing reviews of Braintree really got my interested in them. So I went to their site. The best I've seen yet! Really top notch. Info flows clearly and plainly. Love it... except I'm in Canada. They don't service Canada.
So, anyone got a Braintree-like company in Canada they can reco?
G+ OTOH is the new, shiny, clean kid on the block and my feeds are still pristine.
If FB continues on the path they are on the influential thought leaders who hate clutter will completely leave for G+ and that will be the beginning of the end of FB.
Would G clutter up G+ with junk? Not likely. They LOVE all that more detailed info you're voluntarily giving them that they can then serve up tailored (revenue-generating) ads on your Gmail, searches, partner sites, etc.