The story
Kurt Huang and Gyuchang Jun founded BitPass. Michael O'Donnell was brought on as CEO in 2004, but left in April 2005, and was replaced by Doug Knopper in November 2005.
The idea for the company dated back to 1999 but the company officially incorporated in 2002. $1.5 million in joint venture funding was led by Garage Technology Ventures. The first test version of the product was launched in June 2003. In late 2004, a second funding round of $11.75 million was announced.
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). BitPass also partnered with major technology and financial services companies such as Microsoft, PayPal, the Royal Bank of Scotland and First Data.
On January 19, 2007 Bitpass announced that they were shutting down, and operations officially closed on January 26, 2007.
From Wikipedia’s article on BitPass, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3