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It seems that a handful of Subway stores have started accepting Bitcoin.

In Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Moscow, Russia, Subway customers have posted evidence of paying for their food with the digital currency.

Last week @gotoalberto reported that a Moscow Subway restaurant was offering a discount for Bitcoin.

Subway near Moscow offers 10% off if you pay with #Bitcoin. pic.twitter.com/QMX4bJsNAP

— Alberto GomezToribio (@gotoalberto) November 3, 2013

In the United States, Adam Walsh visited a Subway store in Allentown, Pennsylvania and published a video of his purchase.

Here is his receipt for $12.35, paid in Bitcoin.

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What’s Hypier Than Bitcoin and Google Glass?

Mainstream tech media is having trouble splitting its time between the amazing Bitcoin stories and the emerging excitement behind Google Glass. So why not combine the two into one?

GlassPay is a mobile app that enables both shoppers and merchants to enjoy frictionless and economical sales transactions. Created by New York consulting firm RedBottle Design, the glassware lets users scan items at retail, assemble a shopping cart, and pay using Bitcoin.

RedBottle Design is located in Rochester, NY and was founded in 2007. “We provide software development, web development, and graphic design services, and specialize in mobile app and Google Glass development,” said the firm.

GlassPay Benefits

For customers, GlassPay is taking self-checkout to a whole new level. Like with self-checkout, Google Glass users can avoid waiting in lines for a store clerk to scan their items. But moreover, by integrating Bitcoin payments, customers can pay without ever pulling out their wallet or credit card.

For retailers, the key economic benefits come from Bitcoin, low fees and higher margins. But also, GlassPay offers merchants both large and small an opportunity to build an interactive shopping experience via Google Glass that could be a differentiator for the tech crowd.

“The full platform, including GlassPay for Android and Google Glass, is expected to be in the Play marketplace and Glass Boutique respectively, in the second quarter of 2014,” said RedBottle Design.

Retailers who are interested in using the GlassPay platform should contact RedBottle Design to discuss installation and integration options and pricing.

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Bitcoiniacs Wants to Make it Easier to Buy Bitcoin

Last month we reported that RoboCoin ATM Kiosks officially went on sale for $20,000 per unit.

Now, a retail store in Canada has announced that it has ordered the kiosks and will be deploying them across Canada.

“Basically, it just make it easier for people to buy and sell Bitcoins and hopefully will drive the adoption of Bitcoin, and make it more accessible for people,” Mitchell Demeter, the 27-year-old owner of Bitcoiniacs, told Metro.ca in an interview.

Demeter says that he is planning to roll out the ATMs across major Canadian cities such as Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa.

Related Stories:

• Canadian Startup CoinTap Sells Bitcoin Gift Cards to Help Adoption
• Bitcoin Exchanges in Canada Won’t Be Regulated

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Group Deals with Bitcoin on Coin Forest

It seems like every week there are new companies springing up that are taking proven business models and applying Bitcoin. Bitcoin has several advantages to these businesses: instant transactions, very low fees, and fully digital.

We sat down with the co-founder John Mardlin and Business Development Manager Brandon Gains of Coin Forest, a group-buying site that specializes in deals for Bitcoin, to learn more about their new business.

On Bitcoin: What is Coin Forest and how did you get started?

Brandon Gains: Coin Forest is a Bitcoin-only business that offers special group-buying discounts to the bitcoin community. Coin Forest is a boot-strapped startup out of Victoria, British Columbia.

John Mardlin: Coin Forest is like Groupon for Bitcoiners. Though the main difference is that we care about our community, and our primary motive isn’t profit.

I got started just by finding out about Bitcoin from an acquaintance while I was visiting San Francisco. It wasn’t the best timing really, I put about $1k into BTC at $140 in early April.  We know what happened after that.

I got to thinking about how little the price of Bitcoin is really tied to it’s utility as a means of exchanging real goods and services. I also got to thinking about how effective of a differentiator the currency could be.

At the same time, I was working at PMRobot.com, a project management tool in a really crowded market. The whole SaaS space is so crowded, I thought there might be some opportunity for a group buying site focusing on B2B SaaS.

At some point, all those disjoint thoughts just kind of coalesced into the idea that looks a lot like what Coin Forest is right now.

On Bitcoin: Why the focus on Bitcoin?

John Mardlin: Bitcoin is the whole point! My dream was never to run a daily deals website, but I am very motivated to help expand the reach of the bitcoin economy, and I think this is the perfect model to do it. I wrote about why that is here: http://blog.coinforest.com/bitcoin-group-buying/, but I think that people are only just starting to get it now.

This quote is the first time someone has really effectively put my vision into their own words: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1jhnrt/first_bitcoin_group_buy_deal_opens_today_at_coin/cbf00vs

Brandon Gains: We want to grow the bitcoin economy. Many people have heard about bitcoin but don’t see a reason to buy it unless they are investing. By providing short-term discounts we can create a temporary situation where the only way to get a certain item at a certain price is with bitcoin. We want to be the reason many people get their first bitcoin.

On Bitcoin: Who do you think should use your site?

Brandon Gains: We think our site’s deals will be targeted towards anyone interested in buying: bitcoin related goods/services, 3D printing services, equipment for makers, online education, tools and services for building software, and services for startups/online businesses.

John Mardlin: We want to provide products that will appeal to any bitcoiners, not all of the time, but at least some of the time. As we progress, we’ll discover what people are the most interested in.

Aside from helping people get deals though, we really want to be the place that people go when they want to use bitcoin to buy a particular companies products. My dream is that we can get enough people together, pledging to purchase a major companies product if they begin to accept bitcoin.  This would likely be someone like github, or 23andMe, shapeways, autodesk, atlassian, adafruit…. any tech savvy company that’s shown itself to be a leading innovator.

On Bitcoin: How fast can you scale, considering there are only 11 million Bitcoin in distribution? Whats your long-term view?

John Mardlin: You might look at it like that… or you might see it as one of very few companies providing a service to an economy worth 1 billion dollars. We don’t expect to bump up against the limits of the bitcoin economy, we expect to grow by helping it grow.

Brandon Gains: We feel that bitcoin has started a global movement towards a decentralized economy and we believe that cryptocurrencies are the future of global currency; even if bitcoin falters in a few years there are several promising alt-currencies there to take it’s place. We feel that we can scale up the company quickly once we prove the success of our first deals. We will be able to attract bigger and bigger companies to start accepting bitcoin-only deals.

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