3kMarlin

While LGPL and MPL are similar, there are differences and they should not be lumped together.

The biggest difference is that MPL allows static linking while LGPL does not. While in the past this wasn't a big deal, it is important for iOS development since you cannot dynamically link to libraries in iOS apps.

Someone should do a write up about the history of OpenFeint. It's pretty much a SV Cinderella story now.

2008: Started out as a game developer making the game Aurora Feint

2009: Pivoted to a social game network with Open Feint

2010: Written off by many as Apple announces Game Center

2011: $104M Exit

Kudos to Jason and Danielle.

There were 30 people there in September 2010.

Robert Bigelow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bigelow

His space station company:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Aerospace

Everything goes through Stripe.

There is no way that any merchant account provider would allow you to sign up and start charging customers in 5 minutes like Stripe lets you.

It's only US right now.

Moving to other countries will take time as each country has their own banking/financial/etc issues that need to be dealt with.

It took years for PayPal's Web Payments Pro to go from US only to US, UK. And then a few more years to go to US, UK and Canada.

Amazon FPS has been around for ages and is still US only.

So it may be a while.

Well I doubt it'll be any lower than the industry standard of 2.9% + $0.30 for < $3k/month. If it is, that would be pretty disruptive.

What will be more interesting is if they can match both Amazon and PayPal's microtransaction rate of 5% + $0.05 for products under $10 (Amazon) to $12 (PayPal).

The lowdown on Stripe:

JSON-based HTTP API

PHP, Ruby, Python and JavaScript Support

Setup in 5 minutes.

No branding requirements or redirects.

5% + $0.30 per transaction.

US Based Sellers Only.

Recurring Billing Support.

Data Portability if you ever want to leave.

You pay all initial fees (5% + $0.30) if you issue a refund.

You will only receive money at the end of the next month.

On the surface they are more expensive than PayPal (2.9% + $0.30) Fees.

The fees for Stripe are 5% + $0.30.

However when you take a deeper look you see that things are not so simple. Compared to PayPal's free product, you are not forced to leave your website and go to a 3rd party site to complete the transaction. Compared to PayPal's Web Payments Pro product, you don't have the $30 monthly fee.

Also this doesn't even taken into consideration the complexity and cost of implementing PayPal's Payments Pro api vs Stripe's simpler JSON api.