

Twitter Creator Jack Dorsey’s iPhone Payment System - joez
http://mashable.com/2009/10/17/square-iphone-dorsey/

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mrshoe
Hopefully they can overcome whatever knocked the PayPal crew off this idea
originally:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Beginnings>

Maybe the ubiquity of iPhones was the missing ingredient?

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mahmud
Yep, let's hope they "overcome" gazillions of $.

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jack7890
Is there enough added convenience here to justify a hardware purchase?
Hardware is a tough sell. Make it work with bluetooth alone, and then I'll be
interested.

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jasonlbaptiste
I have zero doubt the hardware will be free. Here's why:

a) They said it might cost only .40 to make. They'll make that back on one
purchase. b) To be competitive, you have to give it away. If you sign up for a
merchant account, most offer the hardware for free and those are big machines.

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jack7890
Fair points, I stand corrected. I didn't realize the manufacturing costs were
so low.

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mjr578
I thought apple was allowing accessories to connect to the dock at the bottom
after the 3.0 software update. Wouldn't it make more sense, and be sturdier if
it was at the bottom? Also, with a bigger piece of hardware you might be able
to use the quick pass functionality of some cards (the ones with ultra super
secure RFID).

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jfarmer
This will plug into any phone w/ a standard TRS connector.

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bombs
Sure, but it won't work with any phone, because Apple uses a proprietary TR
_R_ S connector that allows data to be sent to the iPhone/iTouch (used by
Apple for an external mic and remote on standard earphones).

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Mongoose
Cool idea. What's their specific target market? Frequent craigslisters? Drug
dealers?

I'm a little wary of a point of sale system that could be so easily grabbed
and stolen.

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jonknee
Apple uses portable POS in their stores with great success (ironically on
Windows Mobile). I could see it being handy for salespeople in the field or
for service companies. Not revolutionary, but handy.

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ramanujan
What's interesting here is that the headphone jack in the Iphone isn't a
passive output, but can evidently relay signals back to running applications.

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jonknee
Which makes sense because the headphones also have a mic and volume control.

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ramanujan
Ah. I don't use the built-in Iphone headphones, so that's why I missed that...

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bombs
As a lot of credit and debit cards are moving towards using smart cards with a
PIN over magnetic swipe cards with a signature, I hope that Squirrel will
support these too.

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symesc
A external hardware-based solution? In an age when banks are already allowing
photographs of cheques be deposited?

A "mobile" payment solution has to work from software on out, while deploying
existing hardware in devices: cameras, touch screens, radios.

No, I don't think this is A) viable, or B) something we'd see from someone
like Jack Dorsey.

This is something we'd see from a credit card company looking to keep the old
business model breathing.

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silencio
I particularly like the idea, especially after the first payment-processing
apps started showing up on the App Store but without any sort of accompanying
hardware or ability to capture the credit card number. Just because you need
external hardware to read credit cards doesn't mean the hardware isn't
feasible for use. Neither does it mean this service needs to require that you
swipe a card or only accept credit cards.

I for one would love to have a garage sale with such a device, or to go sell
my knitted or baked goods at some gathering somewhere where people without
such a mobile device might be at a disadvantage payment-wise. I could also,
depending on how durable the external hardware is, see using this in a retail
setting to accept credit cards in a convenient manner, like at the Apple
Store.

I know my AmEx card has expresspay (pretty much just rfid on your card) so I
can just wave my card near a reader instead of swiping, but I can't see that
being standardized for all cards, nor can I see that really working out for
consumer devices like the iPhone. I could sort of maybe see cameras, but that
ends up taking more time than a simple swipe. So why complicate things?

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symesc
Good points.

But I'm not sure I would trust someone with a card reader on his iPhone to
swipe my credit card. . . .

And while I'm also uncomfortable at the gas station doing the same, I have a
higher degree of confidence that the station is legitimate.

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Zev
_And while I'm also uncomfortable at the gas station doing the same, I have a
higher degree of confidence that the station is legitimate._

Why can't a gas station use this software?

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PanMan
I wonder if (and if so, why) it uses the audio port, instead of the dock
connector. With 3.x it's possible to access the dock connector. While I can
imagine it's possible to send data across the audio port (modems anyone?), it
seems like a more difficult route to take. Any idea's on why they would do
that?

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nikolajb
i wonder what one could do with an audio mixer, some stereo cabling and a bag
of the little dongles... guerrilla POS anyone?

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ivankirigin
The innovation isn't really in the device, but what is going on under the
hood. I'm extremely excited about the platform.

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jfarmer
I dunno. I think the fact that it transmits the data via an audio signal is
pretty cool.

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jrockway
I will agree that the Web 2.0 version of an acoustic coupler is much smaller
than the 1970s version:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler>

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alexyim
Does anyone have the headphone jack specifications at hand? It'd be
interesting to see what else could be done.

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blasdel
It's just taking advantage of the analog audio in and out, and possibly the
line-shorting functionality that makes the play/pause button work.

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byoung2
Maybe I'm missing something...woudln't it be better to use PayPal in
situations like these?

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enneff
More people have credit cards than PayPal accounts.

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gojomo
Perhaps passive credit cards should use a barcode instead of a magnetic
stripe, so any endpoint with a camera can swipe them.

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mrtron
It would be better to move to something more secure, not less.

Barcode you could just photocopy/reproduce trivially.

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gojomo
Magstripes are only incrementally harder to reproduce: the equipment is more
expensive, but still available to any attacker. That the magstripe is visually
opaque contributes to a false sense of security -- people thinking the
magstripe info is somehow locked against unauthorized use, even though it's
still essentially plaintext.

The magstripe is thus a bit like the 'lock icon gif' on an insecure login page
-- creating enough of an illusion of security to assist commerce, but
ultimately misleading. A visual barcode would be more honest: letting anyone
see/possess your card long enough to scan/photocopy it is the exact same level
of risk as letting them swipe it through a magstrip reader.

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sachinag
Remember when you could beam money to your friends using your Palm Pilot? That
was awesome. /snark

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benreesman
very cool stuff.

