Michael

A cofounder of twitter started a new company called Square with $10 million of funding from venture capitalists. With that he produced the hardware (credit card reader) and software to allow any owner of an iPhone, iPad, or and Android cell phone to accept credit cards.

The credit card reader is free and there isn't any monthly fee but only a $0.15 plus 2.75% of the traction when the credit card is accepted. That means the average owner can accept credit cards during garage sales or advertisements on craigslist. How does the owner reduce the possibility of fraud when accepting purchases? The owner can take a picture of the buyer and that will be embedded in the receipt and the receipt will be saved in the square server under that owners account as well as sent to the buyers e-mail address and/or cell phone via text message. With the purchasers picture on the receipt, someone is much less likely to defraud you.

The buyer signs the receipt using his finger on the cell phone.

The primary aim of the product is the approximately 20 million small businesses/independent contractors that do not accept credit cards primarily because cost of a terminal, the monthly charge, and the lack of portability unless the person wants to spend a fortune on a portable terminal.

https://squareup.com/
http://omgshots.com/1256-square-port...verywhere.html

Until September 2010, the credit card reader was restricted to about 100,000 customers but is now available to the general population.

kjk1977

The banks will put a stop to it when they buy off Congress because anything that involves in banks losing money is always crushed.

Thydney

I joined the cashless society the day I got married

Michael

Banks won't lose any money but actually make more money. Banks and the credit card companies take a portion of the fee that is charged and currently it is other companies that provide the terminal services. The other providers of terminal services charge a monthly fee and the customer must buy or rent the terminal but they charge less per transaction than this service. The advantage of this service is that you could use it only once every two or three months and pay much less that through a regular provider.

I suspect that concept will take of when cell phones have a credit card reader built into the phone. Then there wouldn't be any hassel for the average owner to sign up in case he ever needed to accept a credit card.

lansbury

They want your SSN when you sign up. Always dubious of that.

Bob

That's very nifty!

Michael

They also need your bank routing/account number so that they can transfer collected money directly to your account.

Michael

All cool things start out in the Silicon Valley.

Bob

Not always...plenty of cool tech out of Boston too

But you're right, more VC opportunities out your way.

Got some friends who do custom dog collars and that kind of crafts, sell online and through a lot of craft fairs in the summer, so this will be pretty handy for them I think

Michael

Also if you sell at a flea market.

Michael

I lived up in the Fremont Hills with a massive amount of open space and a creek down in the valley. I wanted to let my cat go in and out at his pleasure and didn't want to have a cat box, so I purchased one of those automatic sliding door openers (could have purchased a automatic cat door) that could be triggered by an object on his collar. However the object was only magnet so the home was insecure.

I suspect a lot more people would purchase those devices if the device on the collar was a programmable transponder.

lansbury

Never got that far. Stop when a web site of dubious origin advertised on a forum started requiring enough information to clone IDs

Michael

I've never signed up because I don't have iPhone or Android (an antique cell phone only) but the web site should be secure (SSL https)
when asking for that information.

steve100100

I'm tempted to get one. We will be having a yard sale soon.....

Bob

should be easily enough to do with those RFID sets you can get these days...