ideaEDGE Inc. (OTCBB: IDAE) develops prepaid gift card programs utilizing highly popular social sites such as MySpace and Facebook, which have a combined audience of more than 170 million users. It’s an audience that keeps growing as users from all over the world, from every walk of life, and of every age jump on the social networking bandwagon.

ideaEDGE today announced it has secured $1.2 million of new equity funding, which will allow the company to rollout its Social Network Enable (SNE) Group Gift Card platform in late 2008. “Our industry partners are excited about the potential of our SNE Group Gift Card platform,” Jim Collas, ideaEDGE’s CEO stated in the press release. “We expect to have an impressive network of industry partners and gift card merchants for our planned launch this fall.”

With the economy’s weak condition, money is tight for everyone, and shopping with a gift card should make anyone

...

Interesting story on TheStreet.com today; we continue to love near monopolies... multiple ways to win here - as the "pooring of America" continues, cash strapped Americans will turn more to credit (before defaulting in some cases), and much of the rest of the world has yet to see their first credit card...Visa's strategy -- one shared by rival MasterCard MA -- of capitalizing on consumers' increasing reliance on plastic to pay for everyday purchases, rather than simply big-ticket items. Now, the two companies are looking to prepaid cards as another potential growth area, as they attempt to continue strong growth inside the U.S. and -- more important -- globally."The big vision is that ... people talk about prepaid in the same way they talk about credit and debit," says Elizabeth Buse, Visa's global head of product, in an interview with TheStreet.com. "If we're talking a few ...