Tuesday, December 01, 2009

A money lightning bolt! A digital one!

Another entrant into the mobile payment market:

The Square hardware is a small, inexpensive card reader that plugs into the audio jack of a compatible device, including a mobile phone (it's starting with the iPhone and currently has job postings up for BlackBerry and Android engineers). It processes credit card payments, geotags their locations on a map, and e-mails a receipt to the buyer.

As I wrote earlier, eBay is also betting on the emergence of the digital wallet. Long-term, money - a digital signal - will be handled by software, rather than dedicated hardware, but the Square solution might succeed as a short-term stop-gap effort to get small businesses onto the mobile transactions bandwagon.
I wonder how IPv6 is going to affect the picture. Ideally, you would just "ping" your money to the vendor, without any credit cards at all.

tags: money, transfer, payload, control, greatest, infrastructure

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