vshastry

You’re also neglecting TTM as a consideration. As an example, I’m stuck having to wait 6 weeks to get new hardware provisioned into an available slot in one of my data centers to spin up a new Hadoop cluster, something my team could probably do in a couple of hours in the cloud.

That being said, we control the HW and SW stacks end to end so I don’t have to worry as much about the nightmare scenarios the NordVPN folks went public about today. Critical given we’re in fintech ...

He means the band Tool. And yes, it is a shame their music isn’t on Apple Music.

Most Android devices with NFC will probably support the API assuming they are running or are upgraded to KitKat.

Edit: including link to source: http://developer.android.com/about/versions/kitkat.html#44-h...

"Support for HCE is already widely available on most NFC controllers, which offer dynamic support for both HCE and SE transactions. Android 4.4 devices that support NFC will include Tap & Pay for easy payments using HCE."

b) allows you to debit a bank account w/o any verification or micro-deposits

That's an extraordinarily bad idea. If you gave a fraudster access to something like that, they could just pull money out of accounts where they had the routing and account #. You'd also be at risk if the customer fat fingered entry of those numbers and you debited the wrong account.

The US ACH rails lack a lot of necessary features to enable debits without verification of ownership of the account. Unless you want to be on the hook for the above scenarios of course.

no, because if persons with BTC hoard them as a value store rather than spending them as a currency, the merchant won't see (significant) spending from BTC holders.

This type of incident is a key reason the US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network ("FinCEN") issued sensible guidance requiring those who offer wallet (bitcoin transfers between persons and/or merchants) and currency conversion services to be regulated as money transmitters. While money transmitter regulation isn't perfect and is expensive for providers, it can provide some consumer protections in these scenarios.

Edit: Forgot to link to their guidance

http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001....

Commissions are the same as your E*TRADE account; list price is $9.99 for equities although if you are doing higher volumes you can negotiate discounts ($7.99 if you do 150 trades / quarter, and call them up if you are doing a lot of trades for lower pricing).

Data: https://developer.etrade.com/ctnt/dev-portal/getDetail?conte...

There's also a call for data on option chains.

For those with an account, E*TRADE offers a REST based API @ https://developer.etrade.com . Onboarding is manual but once you get your key you can execute trades for your account via the API. Equities / ETFs only right now, they were working on support for other asset types but not sure when they are going to launch it.

Full disclosure - I used to run their developer platform.

This feels a lot like a land grab in an increasingly crowded market. There's a thread on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/Square-Inc-1/Why-did-Square-turn-down-i...

that talks about how Square's traction might be slowing down and how they might also be resorting to similar tactics to drive merchant adoption.

Long term this kind of business isn't bad if you can scale it since the GoPago/Square/etc. of the world can keep 1% or more at the prices they charge merchants. The challenge is that folks like LevelUp will come along and choose to make money off promotions, giving away payments.

It's a good time to be a merchant I imagine - that's a lot of free equipment and support for a small merchant.

San Francisco Bay Area (Menlo Park) - ETRADE Developer evangelist

We're creating a new platform to help developers and institutions build creative solutions to address the massive unsolved problems in the financial services industry. The group is going to be run like a startup inside the larger company - very small and fast iterations.

We're looking for folks to help us evangelize the platform - talk to developers about their needs and translate them into improvements on our side, work with developers as they integrate our API into their solutions, and be the voice of ETRADE as we work with the community to build great product.

You should have experience creating applications or platforms, ideally including experience in mobile platforms and common HTTP Web Services protocols, including XML-RPC, SOAP and REST.

You can learn more / apply at http://bit.ly/wHz8F0 or ping me - I run the team. Thanks!