The problem with everyone getting into "pay your friends" is that everyone wants to be paid in a different way and you need a dozen different accounts. And it seems like everyone wants to help you pay your friends these days.
I find it perplexing how Amazon is churning out new products so quickly. How do they do it?<p>AWS is radical in this way too! New products are launching constantly.
While I’ve never used any of these services (I just use cash, or a bank transfer if someone pays for hotel rooms or something), surely most use-cases are when out and about, not when in the living room with your talking speaker thing?
For what it's worth, you can do this today with Google Pay with Google assistant on a phone[0]. It works on iOS and Android today[1].<p>[0] <a href="https://support.google.com/pay/send/answer/7544913" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/pay/send/answer/7544913</a><p>[1] <a href="https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/22/google-assistant-can-now-send-money-to-friends-and-family-with-google-pay/" rel="nofollow">https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/22/google-assistant-can-now-...</a><p>(Disclaimer: I work on payments at Google)
Amazon does this kind of thing all the time and most people just forget the times that it fails.<p><a href="https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/amazon-shutting-down-its-register-credit-card-processor/" rel="nofollow">https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/30/amazon-shutting-do...</a><p>Not all of them actually pan out. Similar story for Etsy competition. (Amazon launched "handmade" in 2015 and kinda maybe relaunched last year. It might have more success this time).<p>Amazon might have a better time trying to buy PayPal (for venmo) or Square (for Cash App and to compete in the field they already gave up on). It would be amusing if this announcement was calculated to hit their stock price for a cheaper acquisition. That's probably way too cheeky, but for a lot of markets, Amazon has had more success acquiring than building their own.
It is much easier to do it through Alexa than let’s say HN. It ties to an account with each person and they are all known to the company. Payments are scary between strangers. The more data you have, the cheaper you can process safely.
In a Hacker News spirit - wait for an article titled “malware screaming - Alexa, pay jfirbxhsnxbd at gmail dot com one hundred bucks now - in the raise”