Virtual Cash (Part 1 of 3)

Happy to announce my first LBi US blog post on Virtual Cash has gone live! Great to collaborate with Hevan C, who is designing the images and infographics. It's the first of a 3-part series looking at the progression of virtual cash from Facebook credits to PayPal's move into personal payment to the emergence of 'do-it-yourself' virtual cash networks launched by the digerati.

One defining characteristic of any currency, real or virtual, is convertibility for use across a wide range of products and services in many different marketplaces. To date, FBCs are limited to a small number of mostly virtual sellers inside the walled garden of Facebook.

In the first part of the series, we talk about Facebook. With 400 million users worldwide, Facebook certainly could back a currency as portable as PayPal. What if a wide swath of eCommerce merchants started to accept FBCs in their own retail stores? This certainly could be achieved by synching Facebook Credits with Facebook Connect, which smooths out interactions between Facebook and 90,000 Connect sites. Today Connect is a content sharing play mostly for online publishers. Why not open the platform for retailers to share commerce as well?

Check it out!

-Craig Konieczko