Personal transactions -- ones not verified by a bank -- are often problematic and deceitful, like when you trade a guy a perfectly good cow for magic beans, and some giant comes in and keeps talking about fees. Lending some legitimacy to personal payments, XIPWIRE.

Founded by a UPenn grad, XIP's an SMS-based payment system that links your phone number to a bank/credit card, and uses a series of text messages, random IDs, and PINs to guarantee secure, fraud-free transactions, narrowly upending "updating your Shazam while in Kenya" as the quickest way to burn money on a phone. To get started, shoot "GO" to 56624 to get a temporary name and password, hop online to set up your account (and transfer funds, if linking to a bank), and you're set to buy and sell; to initiate a deal buyers text "ID", then the seller takes the number, verifies the buyer's photo and submits the amount, which the buyer then confirms with a PIN in a follow-up text, before happily taking his sweet new oven door flatscreen home. Beyond the person-to-person uses, the service's also catching on around Philly: The Sporting Club at The Bellevue fitness center, all four locations of Capogiro, and French joint Meme now accept XIP payments -- meaning walking around town staring at your phone can now be interspersed with buying a crepe while...staring at your phone.

As the service errs on the side of caution, any undeliverable message cancels the transaction, and should your phone go missing, you can hop on the web to kill your account -- just like certain child-friendly fairy tales advise you to do with any giants who get in the way of you delivering sweet harps that play themselves to all-powerful counts.

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Sales transactions are fee-less for the remainder of the year, and are only 1% for 2011