While it may not be as big of news as Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s firing earlier this week, it comes as no surprise that DrinkOnMe, a “Groupon for Happy Hour,” has sent an email out to users annoucing that it will disctontinue its service, which alloewd users to buy 20€ worth of drinks at select bars for just 12€. Likely running into the similar problems as Groupon has, or having identified the early warning signs for scalability issues, DrinkOnMe seems to have taken the core of their mobile payments technology – it always was quite a smooth technology behind those drinks – and built it out as a standalone app, named Lydia.
Currently available in the iPhone app store, Lydia allows users to exchange money, debit card – to debit card, via their smartphone. For example, if your friend wants to squirm out of paying his debt on a meal or a poker match because “he doesn’t have a fiver,” now you can call him out for the cheapskate he is, without all the fees of PayPal. It has interesting features like keeping track of your receipts, and passbook features like loyalty card organization.
I haven’t quite made up my mind about how often I would use such a service, but DrinkOnMe had a fair amount of data on people’s purchasing habits, so I would definitely keep an eye on this new mobile payments player.