Tech companies should try to provide internal services as SaaS and commercialize them more often. It also helps them improve their services, better documentation, and pushes the service to adapt to the community’s needs.

I like RapidAPI for that reason as a marketplace for web APIs. I also like Google cloud products for a similar reason; many things like Vision, Speech to Text are available as a service with good SDK support for many programming languages.

With the boom of e-commerce, I see everything being delivered to home. It’s great for convenience, but after a point, I feel do people want everything to be delivered home? They have a lot of time in life and would want to get somethings themselves 😛

Will credit cards go obsolete in the future? Credit cards thrive by high-interest rates on debt (~40% of people in the US have credit card debt). Pros: In case of fraud and disputes money gets deducted after the settlement of the issue, ease of payment - tap and go (I wish to compare about what people prefer: physical card vs. card on phone/wearables vs. scanning QR codes), cashback and rewards (giving back some profits from merchant charges back to the customer).

Payment revolution in the US wrt web-commerce: PayPal, Square, Stripe. Also, read about PayPal mafia.

Payment revolution in India: Started by mobile wallets (Paytm, Freecharge, MobiKwik). UPI was the game-changer. Rise of apps based on UPI: PhonePe, Google Pay. And no vendor locked-in amount in wallet and cashback to account directly (for Google Pay) was a gamechanger for adoption. No convenience fees backed the adoption by merchants (Am surprised at this in comparison to merchant charges on card transactions).

You can also read about NEFT, IMPS, RTGS. I personally like the development of local RuPay to bypass Visa and Mastercard networks for domestic transactions. Also, the move by the govt to increase trust in online transactions by 2FA. I am surprised how there’s no 2FA needed for card-based sales outside India. Does anyone else attribute the adoption of UPI to demonetization?

PineLabs looks Square-esque. Also rise of Payment Gateways in India like PayU, CCAvenue, Instamojo. I personally like Instamojo, which started aiming at convenience with payments for businesses and move towards adding a Shopify like model. Look at a similar US-based startup Gumroad which provides ease of payment services for creators.

Chance of undercutting merchant charges using cryptocurrencies built over stable coins. Like Terra, and pass on some benefits to the user in terms of rewards.

Neobanks are trying to replace conventional banks. (Presently backed by real money in partnership with banks) Take an example like Juno, which is a neobank built on cryptocurrencies. I believe it’ll take a lot of time to challenge the bank system, which is also backed by the governments.

Will cash be replaced? Remember, cash can be used for tax evasions and leaves no identity trail of people (one more argument supporting crypto-wallets: they leave no identity trail on the cloud). In contrast, moving away from cash might help people record their transactions digitally and assist them in getting loans.

There’s a strong need to make application filling great again. Move from too-many-questions and never-filled-totally paper forms to just-needed-info digital forms. Also, move towards digital agreements like DocuSign, have verifiable e-documents (avoid fake documents like false job offers). Use blockchain to put up records on a public ledger.

On seeing sites like Medium and Inc42’s subscription model, I feel confused always. When I am done with my stories for the month, I open it and read incognito. Is it a bug/feature? I also remember me and my friends clearing cookies on Hotstar after every 15 mins to see a cricket match for free.