ShopKeep Raises $25 Million to Get Retailers to Ditch Cash Registers for iPads

"I don't have a credit card," Jason Richelson's roommate told him. "I can't spend any money on this Internet thing."

That thought helped pave the way for InternetCash, a financial technology company that offered prepaid cards for online shopping. InternetCash was a failure. The company launched in 1999, just before the Dot Com bubble burst. It hired too many people, purchased unnecessarily expensive software systems and invested "crazy amounts" in marketing that didn't work.

"We made every mistake in the book," Richelson, one of the company's four co-founders, recalls. "InternetCash went out of business like everyone else back then." Read more...