Twitter Creator Jack Dorsey’s iPhone Payment System

Yep, let's hope they "overcome" gazillions of $.

That depends on the cost. If it's like $20, for a mobile vendor that already has an iPhone, that's a minor expense. It's also possible that the dongle is free with a monthly subscription fee.

Btw, what do you mean make it work with bluetooth? The dongle?

I have zero doubt the hardware will be free. Here's why:

a) They said it might cost only .40 to make. They'll make that back on one purchase. b) To be competitive, you have to give it away. If you sign up for a merchant account, most offer the hardware for free and those are big machines.

I think there is a licensing fee involved with using the dock connector - at the least you have to apply to Apple and all that.

There's no reason why you couldn't have a slide-in case designed to make this headphone jack-based one more sturdier though, or something along those lines.

This will plug into any phone w/ a standard TRS connector.

One interesting way to secure the phone could be in a way that the app only work on a certain network (vpn). Authenticated against keys specific to the store. This way it couldn't work if someone tries to extract info from the phone. This is assuming all the data inside the app is encrypted in some form.

p2p transactions in real life. split lunch, gas, kegs, house parties, street vendors, scalpers.

Apple uses portable POS in their stores with great success (ironically on Windows Mobile). I could see it being handy for salespeople in the field or for service companies. Not revolutionary, but handy.

Which makes sense because the headphones also have a mic and volume control.

I particularly like the idea, especially after the first payment-processing apps started showing up on the App Store but without any sort of accompanying hardware or ability to capture the credit card number. Just because you need external hardware to read credit cards doesn't mean the hardware isn't feasible for use. Neither does it mean this service needs to require that you swipe a card or only accept credit cards.

I for one would love to have a garage sale with such a device, or to go sell my knitted or baked goods at some gathering somewhere where people without such a mobile device might be at a disadvantage payment-wise. I could also, depending on how durable the external hardware is, see using this in a retail setting to accept credit cards in a convenient manner, like at the Apple Store.

I know my AmEx card has expresspay (pretty much just rfid on your card) so I can just wave my card near a reader instead of swiping, but I can't see that being standardized for all cards, nor can I see that really working out for consumer devices like the iPhone. I could sort of maybe see cameras, but that ends up taking more time than a simple swipe. So why complicate things?

What's wrong with it? It requires nothing except what would seem to be a fairly simple device, that reads the magnetic stripe. I'd imagine the cost of that is a lot less then getting a "real" credit card processing unit.

I think you missed the mark on Squirrel, completely. This is, to me, one of those things that you can show people and they'll think this is why I have a computer or cell phone.

There is only one bank (USAA, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/technology/10check.html?_r...) that accepts photographed checks on the iPhone. Besides, I don't know anyone that carries checks around, whereas almost everyone I know carries a credit card and some (usually small) amount of cash around. The cash usually doesn't break up easily. Whereas with credit, you can bill the exact amount necessary. Only, its pretty difficult for people to accept credit cards from a friend.

Squirrel changes this. It's person to person, peer to peer payment. You can go out to dinner with someone and split the check, exactly and not have to deal with "Do I owe you $10 from last weeks dinner? Didn't I buy you a few beers last night?". You can have a garage sale or a stand at a market somewhere and accept payments right there in more forms then cash. This is likely to be far more convenient to use then a check is.

I dunno. I think the fact that it transmits the data via an audio signal is pretty cool.

It's just taking advantage of the analog audio in and out, and possibly the line-shorting functionality that makes the play/pause button work.

More people have credit cards than PayPal accounts.

It would be better to move to something more secure, not less.

Barcode you could just photocopy/reproduce trivially.