With Apple and Google doing battle for developers' hearts on in-app payments, the world of micropayments on the Web remains open for conquest, with startups vying for an opportunity to take on PayPal and Google Checkout and enable content owners to sell anything they like - from articles to documents, videos, music and photos. Last month, I highlighted Gumroad. Meanwhile, in January, an entrant called Minno, founded by a pair of former Googlers, emerged to become "spare change for the Web". Today, they announce a partnership with SoundCloud, the popular sound creatiion and sharing service, to deliver what htey call SoundRain.

SoundRain (at http://soundra.in/) empowers musicians who are already making their tracks listenable via the Web on SoundCloud to monetize, with Minno on the back-end, simply by adding embed code to their site, which adds a purchasing option to the standard SoundCloud player. In the introductory video explaining SoundRain, Minno cofounder Noah Ready-Campbell called his service "a new way to buy little stuff on the Web".

Users who want to purchase the song don't need to create a separate account with Minno. They just have to click the "buy" button next to the SoundCloud song, log in to Facebook, and the account is created. As the service is new, and looking for more users, Minno starter accounts come with $2 of credit. good for two songs on SoundRain.

Minno itself launched on TechCrunch and other blogs at the end of March as a small and simple electronic wallet. The company came up with SoundRain just over a week ago at a Music Hack Day in San Francisco, when the team integrated with SoundCloud's API.

For those artists too small or too independent for major labels, or others tired of aggressive revenue sharing from large music services, selling directly to the consumer makes a lot of sense. With SoundCloud gaining momentum and Minno looking incredibly easy to use, there's no reason you wouldn't see buy buttons popping everywhere you see SoundCloud today. And with the Web still struggling to find simple ways for premium content to live, maybe Minno is that answer. Even we dumb bloggers who give content away for free all day have got to find a good way to make a few cents on the side.

When selling digital goods, be they PDFs, photos, art, icons or anything else where a download completes a transaction, creating an online store can seem complicated. A Google Checkout Web Element, released last year, simplified things a bit, but a new entrant, hacked up over this weekend, makes the transaction for posting and delivery as simple as a link, with no need to ever create a custom store. The solution, which is raw, but shows potential, is called Gumroad.

The project of Sahil Lavingia, who is better known for his work on iOS apps like Dayta and Color Stream, was cooked up with the aim to let friends send simple links to each other over sites like Facebook and Twitter, and recognize real revenue from the transaction. So long as the seller has an e-mail account associated with PayPal, there's hardly any setup required.


To start selling digital assets with Gumroad, you need to set up a user name and password, and then you can post links to your digital goods, assigning prices, title and description. Once you share the link, users can buy the goods, and the money, minus a cut that isn't yet finalized, will be deposited to your PayPal account.

I tested the service this morning, posting links for a set of PDF'd comics I made of Oakland A's players from 2005 to 2008, and also the FTC disclosure icons Jeannine Schaeffer made at the end of 2009 for bloggers with conflicts. Try both links - they lead to Gumroad, and if you want the full set, it could cost anywhere between 2 and 3 bucks. It's very easy.


If there are questions about this service's usability, they become like those on other payment systems. If I get the eventual URL for the digital asset, why not pass it around for free? Why not upload that asset to a peer to peer (P2P) service? And why should I trust this service with my credit card data and secret code? They may use HTTPS, but the service could do more to make me comfortable to do transactions. It's also not clear how fast money gets deposited to PayPal.


All those caveats aside, it's an interesting experiment by a known developer who is trying to think of new ways for us to do transactions with one another simply, much like eBay, PayPal and Square have. Check it out at http://www.gumroad.com.