Want to Do Mobile Payments? Here's a Free Tablet

Building both sides of a network, as GoPago or LevelUp attempts to do, is very hard to accomplish - as merchants have to shift away from their current PoS and trust the newcomer enough to embrace them. Further, you will most probably keep both old and new running in parallel, which will further introduce complexities in to keeping the business running.

That is not to say that these solutions are with out value. But they do face an uphill battle, and they should focus equally on proving the merchant value proposition to businesses that are forced to transact in cash vs those who have an entrenched relationship with networks.

This feels a lot like a land grab in an increasingly crowded market. There's a thread on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/Square-Inc-1/Why-did-Square-turn-down-i...

that talks about how Square's traction might be slowing down and how they might also be resorting to similar tactics to drive merchant adoption.

Long term this kind of business isn't bad if you can scale it since the GoPago/Square/etc. of the world can keep 1% or more at the prices they charge merchants. The challenge is that folks like LevelUp will come along and choose to make money off promotions, giving away payments.

It's a good time to be a merchant I imagine - that's a lot of free equipment and support for a small merchant.

Wow, this is quite timely and interesting. For taab, we're faced with a similar problem, and one of our strategies was also to just give away a free tablet.

However, we're targeting the market in a different manner. We'd rather not replace POS systems. Instead, we'd like to integrate with existing systems in larger, more established retailers. Think Starbucks, not your corner coffee shop. Moreover, since we're pushing the use of NFC, in our testing, it turns out that tablets don't really make sense. The only tablet with NFC right now is the Nexus 7 (the BlackBerry PlayBook 4G was just released and is rumoured to have NFC). On the Nexus 7, the NFC antenna is on the back like a smartphone, which doesn't fit with our UX model.

We're not nearly at the same phase as GoPago. We submitted our application to the MintChip Challenge (http://www.mintchipchallenge.com/) last week.

You can check us out at http://taab.co/.

Did you see the Gopaygo demo video? Waaay too complicated.