Just Text Me That Tip

North America is finally (finally!) clueing into text messaging. The rest of the world has been doing it for at least five years, but, for sundry technology and social reasons, North Americans never really got on the SMS train.

Chris writes about TextPayMe, a service that suggests this trend is changing:

I remember learning from a friend that the idea from PayPal came about after a shared lunch with friends – there was no easy way to split the bill. Well, PayPal did solve the problem – but not as nicely as TextPayMe does…TextPayMe allows you to send and receive monies using SMS on your mobile phone. Just for signing up for a free account, they’ll give you $5.

Of course, it only works in the US at the moment. Typical. I’m also not crazy about name. I can see that they’re trying to embed ‘TextPayMe’ into the idea, so that people will in theory say “yeah, just textpayme that ten bucks you owe me”. That sounds incredibly awkward. They’d be better off, I think, invented a word–see Google, Digg et al–that’s less of a mouthful.