23/Sep 2020
7 min. read
This is the writeup of a session I delivered at both the Hong Kong Computer Society EASIG Seminar and Cloud Expo Asia. It’s about how, at PayMe, we started by creating an API product but realized our goal should have been to build an ecosystem instead.
What is PayMe Wikipedia makes a decent job of explaining it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayMe, although it’s a bit light on the products that are most relevant to this post: API and POS.
14/Dec 2016
10 min. read
Almost a year ago I started working with WeChat… I prepared a small intro, but did not share it widely back then.
This evening I presented it - updated- to the Hong Kong codeaholics meetup.
Enjoy!
When we talk about “WeChat” (or “WeiXin”, 微信), most think of one of many smartphone apps used to chat. And this is true - as the app’s main window contains a list of your friends’ contacts (slide 3).
15/Feb 2016
5 min. read
Octopus card is, by all standards, a success story. Introduced in 1997 by a consortium of railway and bus companies, for transit ticketing purposes, it subsequently expanded to other payment usages (restaurants, parking, convenience stores) following Hong Kong Monetary Authority granting Octopus’ operating company a deposit-taking license.
Pretty much everywhere you go in Hong Kong, you can pay with Octopus. It’s as close as one can get to a cashless society utopia.
8/Dec 2015
4 min. read
A no-frills description of what WeChat really is.
I’ve been reading for a while articles about WeChat, a Chinese “mobile instant messaging cum social media” very popular in Mainland China (and not only).
Most of them are a mix and match of:
screenshots of features provided by either Tencent, Tencent’s partners, or brands’ 3rd party developers, delivered as part of the app, wallet, or embedded web browser description of how WeChat is a “platform” capable of delivering any service imaginable (add again lots of use cases, some really existing some not) usually, an ending highlighting how this is the future of apps and how all western apps should follow Tencent’s footsteps But really, what is WeChat?
