BitPass

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Bitpass, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	Mountain View, California (2002)
Headquarters	San Mateo, California, USA
Key people	Kurt Huang, Founder Doug Knopper, CEO
Industry	Consumer Internet, Digital content, Online payments
Products	Bitpass buyer account, Bitpass Professional merchant account, Bitpass Studio merchant account
Revenue	undisclosed
Employees	undisclosed
Website	www.bitpass.com

Bitpass was an online payment system for digital content and services. Kurt Huang is co-founder. Doug Knopper was hired as CEO in November, 2005. Bitpass is a California corporation with headquarters in Silicon Valley. It was founded in December, 2002 and has since partnered with major technology and financial services companies such as Microsoft, PayPal, the Royal Bank of Scotland and First Data.

For the content buyer, Bitpass worked like a pre-paid telephone card: the buyer signed up for the service and put money into an account using a credit card or PayPal; this stored value amount could be used to purchase digital content or services.

Transaction fees were paid by the content provider. For payments under $5, the charge was 15% of the price paid by the buyer (Bitpass Professional merchant account fee).

On January 19th, 2007 Bitpass announced that they will be closing operations. Operations will be officially closed on January 26th, 2007. No immediate reason for closure was given. An email to merchants from Matthew Graves, Bitpass COO said simply, 'We want to thank you for your past business, however due to circumstances beyond our control, we are discontinuing our operations.'

According to the BitPass homepage (Retrieved 31 January 2007), Digital River, an e-commerce outsourcing agency, has been brought in to provide operational support and carry out the process of refunding all unspent monies to respective account holders.