Jay Addison Technical and Media Advisor for CryptoBiz Magazine interviews Paul Puey CEO and Co-Founder of Airbitz at Inside Bitcoins Las Vegas. Airbitz is a company with a vision of Bitcoin mass adoption through ease of use and ease of security. Airbitz has been focused on delivering a great user experience to connect Bitcoin users and merchants through their Bitcoin Directory and integrated mobile wallet. Paul is an Electrical Engineering and Computer Science graduate of UC Berkeley with a wide range of technical skills from low-level 3D graphics engineering to development of custom web CMS systems. He held lead engineering positions with Nvidia Corp and Chromatic Research. Most recently he owned and operated several non-technical small businesses where he implemented solutions to streamline the intersection of people, business, and technology.
Transcript
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this is jay addison from crypto biz magazine we are live in las vegas at the inside bitcoins convention we're here with paul puye the ceo and co-founder of air bits tell us a little bit about air bits uh so eric's is a company building and we've just launched today a mobile app for bitcoin it is an integrated business directory and wallet and where target is definitely the average consumer and the bitcoin evangelist we want to build a great app product that the bitcoin evangelist can refer new users to bitcoin and feel comfortable that these people will have a safe secure and easy to use wallet and it's also very familiar it is implemented in such a way that creation of the wallet utilizes simply just a login and password which is what people are used to in financial and mobile banking so please expand on your business directory i know you guys also operate a directory which is tied in with that wallet is it not it is it actually launched the directory even before we launched the wallet it was launched in march and april of this year it's on the web it's on ios it's on android and where we set ourselves apart is in the quality of the curation of the listings and the ability to search for these listings we have a pretty robust search engine that allows you to search by city state country by current location gps located on your device and it also lets you search by category of almost 200 different categories or by the name of the business and one thing we do unlike a lot of other directories is that we launch region by region we know that it's tough to build a good quality highly curated directory everywhere in the world so instead of saying hey we've launched and we have 7000 listings around the world but you know there's no one area that we have high confidence in instead we launched we say we had initially 300 listings but we're only in three states in the country that's what the way it was in march and april today we've launched in fully launched in 14 different countries a lot of the major countries that have adopted bitcoin and we have over 3 200 listings and we tell people if we're not launching your country don't even bother if we are launched in your country we have very high confidence that we've got just about every brick and mortar merchant and a good chance of a lot of the online web merchants as well so you can actually search for online merchants and businesses in the bitcoin space uh using our directory so if somebody is in any type of business a coffee shop or restaurant whatever it is and they want to start they want to let's say they want to get on your directory do you guys also offer a discount or do they would they offer a discount to the people that are using the air bits wallet is that the idea actually we encourage merchants to offer a discount for not necessarily using the airbus wall but just for accepting bitcoin so when people search for know see a coffee shop in an area we actually highlight right on the front of the search results if the business gives a discount for taking big phones okay it's a valuable thing i think that's what's really going to help bitcoin adoption when people see the value proposition of using a bitcoin versus a credit card and so we want to you know give back to those merchants and actually drive traffic to their business so we we can't create all these listings but we do allow people to let us know which listings now take bitcoin they're right on our front page they can submit a new business and all we ask for is the name of the business a url to their webpage an email address and whether or not the business offers a bitcoin discount and based on that we have curators that will actually build a great and beautiful listing scrape their website for a description website for some photos we'll add social media links to the listing hours of operation um very a lot of detail you just won't find in other business directories uh we go ahead and put that effort to add to ours so if somebody wants to sign up their business it's really easy as you just mentioned go right to your website which is airbits.com airbits.co a irbiter dot co so they go there and on the front page there's a part where they can actually just sign up their business they don't even have to get a hold of you guys absolutely these click click submit a business on our home page and it'll get a super tiny little form once again just for little pieces of information and give us you know a couple days and we'll go ahead and add the business if the business is in a region that we have not yet launched then it won't get added until that region gets launched but feel free to send us an email input airbits.co and give us a nudge if there's a country that you're in and you feel like really should be on the directory and you can help us ensure that we're up to date then we've actually bumped up the priority of several countries because we had an evangelist in that area that wanted coverage and loved our directors that sounds great happy to do that and really really work with the community on providing a resource for these evangelists to promote bitcoin do you have any vision of adding any altcoins at some point to this we definitely do have that vision we have an interesting data model in our wallet where you create an account which is a login password four-digit pin and inside of that account you can create an arbitrary number of wallets and right now you can differentiate the wallet by saying okay this wallet is tied to a specific fiat currency meaning that any transaction that goes into that wallet we will save the fiat currency value of that wallet at the time of the transaction um but we have a data model that abstracts these types of wallets and different types of wallets so we can actually create walls that in addition to being different fiat value walls they're also different um coin walls but that infrastructure does require a bit of work and that would have to be built into the bitcoin project that we use called lib bitcoin which is a library that re-implements the bitcoin protocol and client server model and right now that currently only supports bitcoin um the head developer of that project is amir talking who is the head developer of dark wallet and we work really closely with him on this bitcoin re-implementation and he does have strong interest in incorporating some other altcoins such as lifeline and dogecoin and whatnot he's expressed that interest to us so if that gets incorporated and we actually this is a an open call to developers that have an altcoin that they'd like to promote if they go and put that functionality into libitcoin then that would go a long ways in getting it into wallets that support and utilize little bitcoin that makes sense so what does that i mean you guys sound like you've got a really fantastic business model i mean it's you know we're all about supporting the community and that's what you guys have really done with this directory right is to try and uh and also promote people accepting bitcoins and through the directory through the wallet trying to make it easy for the regular people right your average consumer instead of a techie absolutely i mean i am a technical person i've worked in technology in silicon valley for you know nearly a decade but at the same time i've been first and foremost a part of the community and i've worked in small business in addition to being a technologist and so i see where the consumers and merchants merge and where a lot of the friction comes about when that emerge of consumer and business and technology come into place so we're trying to solve that with arabics and being first and foremost a bitcoin evangelist like i am one of the organizers of the san diego bitcoin meetup a part of the san diego bitcoin association and we saw as individuals as co-founders in our company some of the friction the pain points involved with introducing people businesses into bitcoin and we said you know this is a solvable problem it's gonna require some good insight good engineering good design but it's a solvable problem there's no reason why bitcoin can't feel much more familiar and be easy to introduce to the masses that sounds great what's the key philosophy behind the company and what do you see for airbus future so our philosophy is the true core value of bitcoin which is financial autonomy and financial privacy financial autonomy meaning that you should own your keys own your money be in control of it and obviously financial privacy similar to the values of dark wallet and libitcoin which is the project we leverage we believe in some of those similar values and so that is what we've built into our product and into our company and a lot of people you know outer company feel the exact same way we think that's important for people to control their own money not only from a an ideological point of view but actually from a technical point of view um going to be giving a talk uh at inside bitcoins conference today about the importance of you know wallets that give you financial autonomy from the technical ease of use point of view people don't really see that but it is a difficult challenge for hosted wallets to provide a user experience where they can guarantee that funds are sent when we want to send them right if i want to send money to somebody i want to know that it's getting sent when i request the send and when it hosts wallet pools funds they generally have to only hold a small amount of those funds available for spending at any point in time and so i'm at the mercy of other people that have accounts with the same provider spending money thereby not allowing me to spend my money got it it's kind of like a shared internet connection right when my neighbors are using a whole lot of bandwidth i don't get it yes that's what you can kind of like in a hosted wallet too but that's a trade-off for them they can put more money available online but if they do that then they risk hacking attempts and the security is significantly decreased so we think financial autonomy is not just for ownership of money but it's also to provide a feasible user experience as a spending wallet fantastic paul phue ceo and co-founder of airbits thanks kindly for joining us today no pleasure being on the show one more question sure january 1st 2015 what do you think the price of bitcoin is going to be all right let's double it you know i got to be able to double it you know i think that's pretty reasonable it's below a thousand but above whatever it is 300 something something like that today yeah call it 600 that's a good round 600 is a great one yeah 600 sounds pretty good fantastic thanks paul right cool magazine live from mechler media's inside bitcoins conference in las vegas remember to subscribe to crypto biz magazine at cryptobizmag.com follow us on twitter at cryptobizmag thanks for joining us and learn more at 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