

Visa Backs Jack Dorsey's Square - wyclif
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/04/27/visa-backs-jack-dorseys-square/

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tylerrooney
Whoever Jack Dorsey hired to do his PR should win some sort of award. In under
a year this guy went from almost zero media presence to:

* having a glowing profile written about him in Vanity Fair

* appearing on Charlie Rose

* being anointed as the second coming of Steve Jobs by TechCrunch

* having the media at large make Evan Williams look like a jerk and return to Twitter as Executive Chairman

* getting The Wall Street Fucking Journal to title an article "Visa Backs _Jack Dorsey's_ Square"

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patrickod
The Vanity Fair profile was brilliantly written.

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wyclif
Yes, it was. It discusses Jack's habits, Jack's preference in suits (Prada,
practically an advertisment for them), Jack's preference in wristwatches
(Rolex), Jack's ideas, Jack's relationships, Jack's friends, et. al.

~~~
spitfire
It discusses Jack's Nouveau riche tendencies - Oh look i'm rich, let me show
it off and pretend to be sophisticated. Does he really admire the quality of a
Prada suit or a rolex watch? Very very doubtful, those even slightly in the
know despise cheap fashion like Prada.

I want his PR rep's number though, they are masters. If Jack is his own PR,
kudos to him.

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msy
Square is awesome but I wish someone would do what it takes to kick the shit
out of the broken mess that is the credit card system instead of attempting to
fix some of the problems at the edge. Admittedly this is in the Seriously Hard
category of problems.

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aidenn0
This just makes financial sense.

1) Assume that square being successful will increase the number of credit card
transactions.

2) Assume that Visa will make some money off of a fraction of those
transactions

3) This means that an investment by Visa at market value will payoff at above
market value since they make more money than just the market-value returns
from their investment.

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wmboy
This is very big for Square.

The main issue with their flagship product is security. When every other
country in the world is moving fast to accept chip card transactions a United
States company comes out with a so called "innovative" product which reads the
magstripe only.

Visa have been heavily pushing chip card technology so for them to push this
product shows they are willing to allow Square some slack in the security
requirements.

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tesseract
The reason Visa (and the other card networks) have been heavily pushing
smartcards/RFID/etc. is that it is an excuse for them to move liability for
fraud from the banks/merchants to consumers. So as a consumer who has some
doubts about the security of the chip technology, I'd have to say that I
welcome any slowing of the transition.

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CodeMage
See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2489937>

