

Cube (YC W12) Goes Deeper Than Your Standard iPad Register - swohns
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/08/ycombinator-cube/

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bsimpson
Does that qualify as trademark infringement? I can definitely see the case for
customers being confused by the similarity to Square.

edit: Can someone please explain why this is being downvoted? I'd like to make
sure my contributions are constructive.

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ajju
Does that mean all shapes are off limits now?

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rpedroso
No. Square and Cube offer very similar products.

If I started a fruit distribution company and called it Rhombus, there
probably wouldn't be an issue.

I can't say whether there is definitive trademark infringement here (Cube
seems to offer analytics services and targets a niche market, differentiating
its product). However, I can't help but feel that "Cube" is a reference to
Square.

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pc86
I think trademark infringement is definitely too strong. That being said, I
think it's a stupid name.

"Oh look we're going to be marginally competitive to Square, we're going to
offer _more_ than _Square_.. CUBE!"

No. It's an unoriginal, hackish name, but at the end of the day it looks like
it could be a decent product.

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coffee
The challenge in this space is not the technology, or more cool/useful
features.

It's merchant adoption.

It's a massive barrier to entry when a local business has invested upwards of
10's of thousands of dollars on their existing POS system. Or, the flip side
of the coin is that they have zero desire to get anything more technical than
a $60 register from PriceClub. This is scary stuff to most local merchants.

It's a super long term play to get market share.

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ippisl
With 400K-580K restaurants and more than $600 billion revenue and 2.5% fees,
and the barriers to entry are not throughout network effects , but through
data lockout and habits , you don't need to gain a lot of market share to have
a pretty good business.

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Domenic_S
Gordon Ramsey has outfitted several restaurants on Kitchen Nightmares with
iPhone-based (or other "new gen") POS systems, and I'm interested to see if
they still use them.

There seems to be so much going on in this space, especially with the advent
of low-cost, high-performance touch devices. I'm a little surprised I haven't
heard of some massive win yet, like a major retailer transitioning. Kitchens
are at least high-volume, I wonder if they're a good indicator.

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shaanr
Square seems to be the go-to AFAIK.. they probably have the widest following
in terms of absolute number of businesses adopting them. I could be wrong
though.

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coffee
The Square register was a huge flop with most merchants (though they are
addressing these issues with more recent updates). Most merchants I've
interviewed that use an iPad as a POS solution have tried it, and dumped it
for something that actually met their needs. Again, they are addressing these
issues, but that was the feedback I received less than 6 months ago.

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WrkInProgress
Can you expand on why it was such a flop with merchants ?

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coffee
Sorry, I don't have much info other than it didn't have the critical features
they needed in order for it to be useful. The details of those features I
never asked about. What I can tell you is that I mainly spoke with cafes,
restaurants and other food service related merchants. Only spoke with a
handful of retail merchants... Hope that helps!

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bryans
If they have the ability to add options to an individual product, they're
already a mile ahead of Square. Square's biggest oversight with their Register
app is that it's completely unusable for things like food orders. You can't
add bacon to a burger with the touch of a button, you have to type it in. And
if that bacon is an additional charge, you have to go back to the categories
section, then go into an extras category, and add it to the order as a
separate product.

If you've got five or ten additional charges for extras, you've now got a
receipt that is very long and nonsensical, and you've wasted a non-trivial
amount of time needlessly switching between categories.

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nlh
Looks interesting - glad to see some competition heating up in the POS space.

Any way to try out the service without fully signing up for an account? There
are a few features I'd like to see if it has (that almost every other iPad POS
lacks) and I don't want to create an account just to sandbox....

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jonknee
What are those features?

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nlh
We've been selling a ton of product via Groupon and need a POS system to
handle the redemptions of those Groupons.

One little quirk is that Groupon does NOT collect sales tax, so we're required
to collect tax at the time of redemption.

We need our POS system to handle a payment of type "Groupon" for $X and then a
second payment for $Y.

So - for example - if a product is $100 and tax is 5% (total due: $105), we
need the total due to show as $105 (naturally), then apply the Groupon payment
of $100 and show a balance due of $5, to be paid by credit card or cash.

Last I checked Square register doesn't support this, Shopkeep doesn't support
this, and a few others I checked don't either. It's not rocket science - just
the ability to accept 2 or more payments for each sale (Groupon + cash or
Groupon + credit card) and have the balances get calculated correctly.

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jonknee
Isn't that the same as any coupon? Why not set up a "Groupon Coupon" that
applies a $100 discount. It should end up with the sales tax at the end like
you need.

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jonknee
Why limit to an iPad? For retail applications a tablet seems less useful (for
starters, it's much easier to disappear when you turn around than your
standard kiosk type machine).

With Windows 8 adopting touch there are lots of touch enabled PCs out there.

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rckrd
I'm interested to see how big a share of the market the "artisan store or
coffee shop" is.

And how are they able to offer 2.5%, while Intuit and Square charge 2.75%? You
would think that for non-enterprise customers, they would charge more.

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abbasmehdi
_You would think that for non-enterprise customers, they would charge more._

You mean charge less? In my limited experience enterprise customers are less
price sensitive and more "how do I not get fired for choosing this vendor over
the status quo" sensitive.

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flog
How does this stack up against something like VendHQ? (Which I hear is pretty
awesome because of the Xero integration)

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peeln
Curious here as well. While it's wonderful that these POS entrants are coming
out in droves for small business - I'm surprised to see so few focus on
integrating the Brick & Mortar with web-stores. VendHQ has their Shopify
integration but aside from that, who else (form any YC class) is offering a
complete setup?

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sethbannon
Cube certainly seems to have more dimensions than Square.

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killahpriest
To be exact, six times as many dimensions.

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pc86
Square dimensions = 2

Cube dimensions = 3

3/2 = 1.5

Cube dimensions = 1.5x Square dimensions

