With Lemonade, the company is creating the first truly open mobile wallet platform that supports multiple branded payment cards, loyalty cards, coupons and more. With the new API integration capability and easy-to-use tools, Lemonade offers users an enhanced mobile wallet user experience, and gives merchants and brands a powerful, yet simple, way to connect with consumers through branded add-ons built into the Lemon Smarter Wallet.

"Lemonade brings tremendous value to the consumer by creating a smart, dynamic wallet that's simple, yet powerful, and provides much more than just backup for their physical wallet"
Aiming to build a rich digital environment that replicates the physical wallet and enhances its functionality, Lemon also announced the release of enhanced premium features for its mobile wallet app, including an additional security layer, enhanced card monitoring tools and card management tools.

Lemon is sponsoring the Lemonade Challenge to kick off the launch of its platform. The Lemonade Challenge is an open developers' contest that will award over $20,000 in cash, prizes and promotional exposure for the best add-ons created using the Lemonade platform.

Lemonade: Creating the First Truly Open Wallet Platform

While mobile wallet apps are cropping up everywhere, none are holistic enough to replicate the functionality of the physical wallet. Apps for mobile payments, loyalty card management, coupons, banking and spending trackers are separate and disconnected. Credit card companies won't allow users to store competing cards in their app, and the loyalty card for your favorite coffee shop can't sit next to one for a competing brand.

With Lemonade, Lemon aims to create a better mobile wallet—all the existing functionality of a physical wallet, enhanced with the ease, utility, simplicity and access of a mobile phone. Lemonade is the first open wallet platform that allows users to grant access to their Lemon data to enable developers to create valuable add-ons leveraging payment card transaction data, loyalty card integration, coupon tracking, price comparison tools and more—all with push notification capabilities and all within the Lemon Smarter Wallet.

"The entire mobile wallet space is disjointed and made up of multiple walled gardens that take away from the ease of use and simplicity that consumers are asking for," said Lemon founder and CEO Wences Casares. "Our goal is to eliminate those barriers and give consumers the simplicity they would expect to use their mobile wallet exactly as they do their physical wallet—including all of its multiple cards, coupons, receipts and more, only in digital form and without all the clutter. We aim to deliver something more useful and secure than even your physical wallet."

Lemon is cross-platform and cross-branded, allowing consumers to store and easily use the entire contents of their physical wallet—including identification, insurance, payment and loyalty cards and receipts, as well as a wide range of value-added services that leverage this stored data—all from within the Lemon Smarter Wallet app on an Android, iOS or Windows Phone device. Through the add-ons they select, users can receive valuable offers, such as discounts, cash-back offers and more, based on their stored data and delivered directly into their Lemon Smarter Wallet for easy redemption.

Users can browse a variety of third-party add-ons and then easily add these directly to their Lemon Smarter Wallet. Lemon is also working to integrate Apple's new Passbook for iOS 6, so iPhone users can choose which Lemon wallet components they want to send to Passbook. For security, all Lemon user data is fully encrypted and access to a third-party add-on is granted by the user.

Development and Data Analysis Made Simple and Easy

For brands, marketers and developers with little or no programming experience who are looking for a straight-forward way to deliver value into Lemon users' wallets, the company is also offering a new SmartCard Wizard, a build-your-own ticket, coupon, loyalty and gift card maker. The simple wizard-based system lets third parties upload their brand's logo, complete a few form fields and make promotional offers available to users through the Lemon Smarter Wallet app.

With SmartCard Wizard, there's no need to worry about complicated coding, integration and other programming issues. Just a few clicks and only a few minutes is all it takes to start reaching out to customers through Lemon Smarter Wallet.

With the Lemonade Data Dashboard, developers can access anonymous user demographics, spending habits and redemption analytics to better understand customer behavior, segmented by country, currency, favored merchants, age, gender, and purchase categories.

"Lemonade brings tremendous value to the consumer by creating a smart, dynamic wallet that's simple, yet powerful, and provides much more than just backup for their physical wallet," Casares said. "At the same time, brands and other third parties now have the opportunity to connect with targeted audiences in a way that requires no effort by the consumer. With our API and SmartCard Wizard, we've also dramatically shortened time-to-market and reduced the cost of branded mobile apps and promotional programs."

Lemonade Developer Challenge

The Lemonade Developer Challenge submission period opens today and runs through Nov. 26th, 2012, with public voting Dec. 03-13, 2012. Two Grand Prizes worth up to $9,000 include $3,000 cash and a trip to meet with the Lemon team in Palo Alto, California or Buenos Aires, Argentina with airfare for two, hotel and food, and entertainment. The Popular Choice Grand Prize will be determined by voters and the Judges' Choice Grand Prize will be selected by a panel of judges. Additional prizes will also be awarded.