Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s Square is, nearly, open for business. Clearly not content with having just one world-changing innovation under his belt, his new mobile payment service lets vendors collect cash from a usual credit card using a mobile phone.
Dorsey demonstrated a Square transaction in a San Francisco coffee house to TechCrunch. The cost of a coffee in San Fran, $4. The ability to pay the vendor directly with your credit card using their mobile phone, priceless.
Square uses a small card scanner which hooks up to a mobile by plugging straight into the audio-in jack. It lets you make physical credit card transaction payments, instantly. Think PayPal but for the physical world. At the moment it works on both the iPhone and Android handsets.
It swipes the card’s magnetic strip and the credit card owner is then required to sign for verification using the phone’s touchscreen. A photo of the credit card owner is displayed on the phone for added security. Visa, American Express and MasterCard have all agreed to let Square take payments from their cards. Receipts are provided in email and text form too, so everything’s recorded electronically.
Square is already valued at $40million which tells us two things. Firstly, it’s going to be huge and secondly, Dorsey’s probably not all that bothered that Twitter doesn’t seem to be able to make any money.
Out TBA | £Free | Square (via TechCrunch)
