VC-backed startup Kwedit is best known for three things: for enabling people to pay for digital goods online through small amounts of virtual credit; for its silly name; and for the viciously funny lambasting it received by Stephen Colbert for both of these things.

But Kwedit’s founders and investors have had a bigger ambition for the company almost from the start: to enable at least one-quarter of the U.S. population to make remote cash transactions — from global remittances to bill paying to catalog shopping to the purchase of virtual goods in social media games.

“Basically, if you want to use cash to pay a vendor but can’t hand it to them directly, we’re building a set of services to do that for you,” Shader told me back in March.

Apparently, those services are nearly ready. In August, peHUB has learned, the company rolls out PayNearMe. According to its site, the service is targeting “25 percent of American households that don’t have a credit or debit card” along with the “75 percent who do, [but] don’t want to use them online for security, privacy, or budgeting reasons.”

If there’s one point that Kwedit founder Danny Shader would like to communicate above all else, it is that his one year-old company — which already has been excoriated by Stephen Colbert and favorably reviewed in the NYT — is a serious operation with two potentially lucrative ways to change how we pay for things.

Shader’s message may be hard to stick. Kwedit, which went live on February 3, has received attention mostly for one aspect of its business: Kwedit Promises. The feature allows anyone over age 13 to pay for digital goods online by extending them small amounts of credit. Later, using the company’s Kwedit Direct system, he or she can pay back what was borrowed using Mom or Dad’s credit card; by sending in cash through a Kwedit-supplied envelope; or by printing up a barcode that can be scanned at a nearby 7-Eleven, which accepts cash payments, then alerts Kwedit that a particular “promise” has been kept.