Twitter Creator Jack Dorsey’s iPhone Payment System

http://mashable.com/2009/10/17/square-iphone-dorsey/

by joez • 17 years ago

41 39 17 years ago

mashable.com

Mongoose• 17 years ago

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.

lyime• 17 years ago

One interesting way to secure the phone could be in a way that the app only work on a certain network (vpn). Authenticated against keys specific to the store. This way it couldn't work if someone tries to extract info from the phone. This is assuming all the data inside the app is encrypted in some form.

jgilliam• 17 years ago

p2p transactions in real life. split lunch, gas, kegs, house parties, street vendors, scalpers.

jonknee2• 17 years ago

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.

benreesman• 17 years ago

very cool stuff.

symesc2• 17 years ago

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.

silencio2• 17 years ago

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?

symesc2• 17 years ago

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.

devicenull• 17 years ago

What's wrong with it? It requires nothing except what would seem to be a fairly simple device, that reads the magnetic stripe. I'd imagine the cost of that is a lot less then getting a "real" credit card processing unit.

Zev2• 17 years ago

I think you missed the mark on Squirrel, completely. This is, to me, one of those things that you can show people and they'll think this is why I have a computer or cell phone.

There is only one bank (USAA, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/technology/10check.html?_r...) that accepts photographed checks on the iPhone. Besides, I don't know anyone that carries checks around, whereas almost everyone I know carries a credit card and some (usually small) amount of cash around. The cash usually doesn't break up easily. Whereas with credit, you can bill the exact amount necessary. Only, its pretty difficult for people to accept credit cards from a friend.

Squirrel changes this. It's person to person, peer to peer payment. You can go out to dinner with someone and split the check, exactly and not have to deal with "Do I owe you $10 from last weeks dinner? Didn't I buy you a few beers last night?". You can have a garage sale or a stand at a market somewhere and accept payments right there in more forms then cash. This is likely to be far more convenient to use then a check is.

sachinag• 17 years ago

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

jack78902• 17 years ago

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.

terpua• 17 years ago

That depends on the cost. If it's like $20, for a mobile vendor that already has an iPhone, that's a minor expense. It's also possible that the dongle is free with a monthly subscription fee.

Btw, what do you mean make it work with bluetooth? The dongle?

jasonlbaptiste• 17 years ago

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.

jack78902• 17 years ago

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

ramanujan2• 17 years ago

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.

jonknee2• 17 years ago

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

ramanujan2• 17 years ago

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

mjr578• 17 years ago

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).

silencio2• 17 years ago

I think there is a licensing fee involved with using the dock connector - at the least you have to apply to Apple and all that.

There's no reason why you couldn't have a slide-in case designed to make this headphone jack-based one more sturdier though, or something along those lines.

jfarmer2• 17 years ago

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

bombs2• 17 years ago

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

gojomo2• 17 years ago

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

mrtron• 17 years ago

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

Barcode you could just photocopy/reproduce trivially.

gojomo2• 17 years ago

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.

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

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

jfarmer2• 17 years ago

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

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

That's what makes it not an "iphone device". Software to parse it can run on any phone with a jack. That makes it convenient, but isn't really the product.

jrockway• 17 years ago

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

mrshoe• 17 years ago

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?

mahmud• 17 years ago

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

byoung2• 17 years ago

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

enneff• 17 years ago

More people have credit cards than PayPal accounts.

bombs2• 17 years ago

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.

alexyim• 17 years ago

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

blasdel• 17 years ago

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.

nikolajb• 17 years ago

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

PanMan• 17 years ago

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?

Twitter Creator Jack Dorsey’s iPhone Payment System

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