Cube (YC W12) Goes Deeper Than Your Standard iPad Register | Hacker News Reader

Cube (YC W12) Goes Deeper Than Your Standard iPad Register

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43 pointsswohns32 comments

Does that qualify as trademark infringement? I can definitely see the case for customers being confused by the similarity to Square.

edit: Can someone please explain why this is being downvoted? I'd like to make sure my contributions are constructive.

Does that mean all shapes are off limits now?

No. Square and Cube offer very similar products.

If I started a fruit distribution company and called it Rhombus, there probably wouldn't be an issue.

I can't say whether there is definitive trademark infringement here (Cube seems to offer analytics services and targets a niche market, differentiating its product). However, I can't help but feel that "Cube" is a reference to Square.

I think trademark infringement is definitely too strong. That being said, I think it's a stupid name.

"Oh look we're going to be marginally competitive to Square, we're going to offer more than Square.. CUBE!"

No. It's an unoriginal, hackish name, but at the end of the day it looks like it could be a decent product.

The top result for Paypal Triangle is Paypal Here, so maybe Paypal reconsidered that brand.

https://www.google.com/search?q=paypal+triangle

I don't know why you were downvoted.

It is a very legitimate point as there have been examples of similar sounding names in the same industry counting as trademark infringement.

The challenge in this space is not the technology, or more cool/useful features.

It's merchant adoption.

It's a massive barrier to entry when a local business has invested upwards of 10's of thousands of dollars on their existing POS system. Or, the flip side of the coin is that they have zero desire to get anything more technical than a $60 register from PriceClub. This is scary stuff to most local merchants.

It's a super long term play to get market share.

With 400K-580K restaurants and more than $600 billion revenue and 2.5% fees, and the barriers to entry are not throughout network effects , but through data lockout and habits , you don't need to gain a lot of market share to have a pretty good business.

Gordon Ramsey has outfitted several restaurants on Kitchen Nightmares with iPhone-based (or other "new gen") POS systems, and I'm interested to see if they still use them.

There seems to be so much going on in this space, especially with the advent of low-cost, high-performance touch devices. I'm a little surprised I haven't heard of some massive win yet, like a major retailer transitioning. Kitchens are at least high-volume, I wonder if they're a good indicator.

I was recently (a few months ago) at Gordon Ramsey new restaurant in Vegas. They pull out iPads for your wine and beer selection. They would leave it at the table and you could look through the different wines, the regions they came from, how they were made, etc... Same with the beers. It was interesting, but honestly felt like a novelty. Super cumbersome and sort of gave you too much to read. Made the choice harder (for me and my party at least)...

Square seems to be the go-to AFAIK.. they probably have the widest following in terms of absolute number of businesses adopting them. I could be wrong though.

The Square register was a huge flop with most merchants (though they are addressing these issues with more recent updates). Most merchants I've interviewed that use an iPad as a POS solution have tried it, and dumped it for something that actually met their needs. Again, they are addressing these issues, but that was the feedback I received less than 6 months ago.

Anecdotally:

I've eaten at local places that used Square. I have no idea if they're happy customers.

I've seen increased use of Square at our local public farmers markets. The guy I buy my beef from loves his. It's lower initial cost, higher transaction cost, and super easy to use.

(I support any disruption that eats into the VISA/MasterCard/Etc oligarchy.)

Can you expand on why it was such a flop with merchants ?

Sorry, I don't have much info other than it didn't have the critical features they needed in order for it to be useful. The details of those features I never asked about. What I can tell you is that I mainly spoke with cafes, restaurants and other food service related merchants. Only spoke with a handful of retail merchants... Hope that helps!

If they have the ability to add options to an individual product, they're already a mile ahead of Square. Square's biggest oversight with their Register app is that it's completely unusable for things like food orders. You can't add bacon to a burger with the touch of a button, you have to type it in. And if that bacon is an additional charge, you have to go back to the categories section, then go into an extras category, and add it to the order as a separate product.

If you've got five or ten additional charges for extras, you've now got a receipt that is very long and nonsensical, and you've wasted a non-trivial amount of time needlessly switching between categories.

Looks interesting - glad to see some competition heating up in the POS space.

Any way to try out the service without fully signing up for an account? There are a few features I'd like to see if it has (that almost every other iPad POS lacks) and I don't want to create an account just to sandbox....

I just spoke to them on their website's livechat/Olark -- they're very responsive and helpful. Also the service is free so no reason not to play with it.

What are those features?

We've been selling a ton of product via Groupon and need a POS system to handle the redemptions of those Groupons.

One little quirk is that Groupon does NOT collect sales tax, so we're required to collect tax at the time of redemption.

We need our POS system to handle a payment of type "Groupon" for $X and then a second payment for $Y.

So - for example - if a product is $100 and tax is 5% (total due: $105), we need the total due to show as $105 (naturally), then apply the Groupon payment of $100 and show a balance due of $5, to be paid by credit card or cash.

Last I checked Square register doesn't support this, Shopkeep doesn't support this, and a few others I checked don't either. It's not rocket science - just the ability to accept 2 or more payments for each sale (Groupon + cash or Groupon + credit card) and have the balances get calculated correctly.

Isn't that the same as any coupon? Why not set up a "Groupon Coupon" that applies a $100 discount. It should end up with the sales tax at the end like you need.

I don't think customers are expecting that. I wouldn't.

Why limit to an iPad? For retail applications a tablet seems less useful (for starters, it's much easier to disappear when you turn around than your standard kiosk type machine).

With Windows 8 adopting touch there are lots of touch enabled PCs out there.

I'm interested to see how big a share of the market the "artisan store or coffee shop" is.

And how are they able to offer 2.5%, while Intuit and Square charge 2.75%? You would think that for non-enterprise customers, they would charge more.

You would think that for non-enterprise customers, they would charge more.

You mean charge less? In my limited experience enterprise customers are less price sensitive and more "how do I not get fired for choosing this vendor over the status quo" sensitive.

How does this stack up against something like VendHQ? (Which I hear is pretty awesome because of the Xero integration)

Curious here as well. While it's wonderful that these POS entrants are coming out in droves for small business - I'm surprised to see so few focus on integrating the Brick & Mortar with web-stores. VendHQ has their Shopify integration but aside from that, who else (form any YC class) is offering a complete setup?

Cube certainly seems to have more dimensions than Square.

To be exact, six times as many dimensions.

Square dimensions = 2

Cube dimensions = 3

3/2 = 1.5

Cube dimensions = 1.5x Square dimensions

You wouldn't know that to look at the text on their site, you'd think someone made a rectangle out of them by squishing the sides: https://www.getcube.com/point-of-sale

Umm, 1.5 times?

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