Paul Puey on Bitcoin adoption through AirBitz mobile wallet

Jay Addison Technical and Media Advisor for CryptoBiz Magazine interviews Pau 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.

Jay: This is Jay Addison from CryptoBiz Magazine, we are live in Las Vegas at the Inside Bitcoins convention. We're here with Paul Puey, the CEO and co-founder of AirBitz. Tell us a little bit about AirBitz.

Paul: So AirBitz is a company building, and we've just launched today a mobile app for Bitcoin. It is an integrated business directory and wallet. And our 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 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 a wallet, utilizes simply just a login and password, which is what people are used to in financial and mobile banking.

Jay: 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?

Paul: It is and actually we launched the directory even before we launched the wallet. It was launching in March and April of this year. It's on the web, it's on IOS, it's on Android. Where we set ourselves apart is in the quality of the curation of the listings, and the ability to search though these listings. We have a pretty robust search engine. It allows you to search by city, state, country, by current locations – GPS located on your device. And it also lets you search by category. And with almost 200 different categories go 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 watched, and we have 7000 listings around the world. But there's no one area that we have high confidence in." Instead, we launch and say, "We had initially 300 listings, but we're only in three states in the country." That's 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 bought the Bitcoin. And we have over 3200 listings. And we tell people, "If we're not launched in 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 and web merchants as well. So you can actually search for online merchants and businesses in the Bitcoin space using our directory.

Jay: So if somebody is in any type of business, a coffee shop, a 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 AirBitz wallet, is that the idea?

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