A few months ago, I was gung ho about getting an Android app out for use with Pay It Square. And I was pretty close. But priorities change and opportunities come up that just can't be passed up.

tl;dr version: Pay It Square has merged with Open Systems Technologies.

The slightly longer version: Back in October, PayPal hosted their Innovate Developer Conference, and we decided it was the right time to make the trip to start building some relationships with PayPal. That did happen, but there were two things that took place at the conference that (in my opinion) changed the trajectory of Pay It Square:

1. We won an X award in the Request/Send Money category.
2. PayPal announced the launch of their own App Store.

After Innovate, we focused on the opportunity that the app store presented. As part of that, we made major architectural changes to the site, including what essentially turned out to be a rewrite of the site. We moved from web forms and the Kinetic Framework to ASP.NET MVC 3 and NHibernate. We launched the revamped site back in January, and started working on what our app would look like through PayPal. As part of that, we used the same infrastructure and built an app that can be used fully through Facebook. We launched that last week.

We also built a rest-based API for Pay It Square that gives you access to just about everything an organizer can do through the website. We launched that back in January, although we haven't actively promoted it yet. Having it has allowed us to do a couple of things. First, we farmed out the development of an Android and iPhone application (which is why my Android series sputtered - I stopped doing the main development on it). With the API, they can use a well-known interface to interact with Pay It Square, providing a way for organizers to completely manage their Collect Pages on the go. Secondly, the first official use of the API occurred last week, when we had a pool use Tourneytopia to run a charity tournament. Tourneytopia offers integration with Pay It Square, and it uses the API to do it's work. The charity so far has raised over $2,500.

While all of this technical work was going on, we were also talking to Open Systems Technologies (OST) about a partnership between our two companies, which culminated in Pay It Square merging with OST a couple of weeks ago. We're even briefly mentioned in the OST Company video (look for the site around the 55 second mark).

Brian and I founded Pay It Square a few years ago, and our intent was to build a useful utility and see where it went from there. We were convinced there was a market for this type of service, and the entrance of WePay into the market, and it's subsequent fund raising reinforced our beliefs. But there were skills that we just don't possess that we needed to make Pay It Square successful, and the partnership with OST provides us with access to those, as well as giving us access to more development time to build out a few features we feel are key to rounding out our offering.

We're excited to see what the future holds for us, and looking forward to being able to realize the vision we've had for Pay It Square. It's definitely been an adventure, and it's not over yet!