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I'm in Chicago as well, and I've had drivers give me a 'free' ride when I try to pay with a card. It's only happened a couple times, but both times they were quick trips less than $5. When I pulled my card out they would have some choice words telling me to get out of the cab...

My company, Cashier Live (http://www.cashierlive.com), is in the same space as Erply and some others. We haven't ran into Square competitively at all, as Square is getting their business traction from mobile businesses & small quick serve restaurants/coffee shops/bakeries etc.. Cashier Live (and Erply, from what I can tell) is targeted towards retailers with inventory on the shelves, something Square isn't good for.

Their iPad app is a bit more comparable, but you'd really be pushing it to say that their iPod/iPhone app can replace a point-of-sale system.

Square is perfect for mobile business like landscapers, plumbers, artists, etc. But for businesses with a brick & mortar location, they're missing a lot of the things so they won't be replacing pos system as is.

Some of the standard point-of-sale features that Square is missing I don't ever see them getting in to. Things like cash management, re-ordering inventory, employee time clocks... that's what store owners are looking for in a pos system.

The iPad app is OK for more simple businesses, which is why they always show it in a coffee shop and not a retail store. If they offered a payments API I think they would be able to break into this market not by replacing the POS, but by replacing the credit card terminal.

I wonder if there are any grants available for a project like this? That would probably be the best way to get something like this going, but it would be more for the greater good as opposed to a business.

They mentioned it as 1800Flowers.com, so their CMS probably turns anything with '.com' into a link. I'm sure their SEOs high-five'd when they noticed that :)

Most restaurant/bar specific POS systems are water resistant for exactly that reason. I'm sure it that's happened though, that's why it's "water resistant" and not "water proof".

So lets say it happens to your iPad POS and you run down to the Apple store to get a new one. What happens to your data? Is it stored on the device, or is the backend hosted somewhere? How do you get your old data into your new iPad?

Another thing I just thought of... lets say there's a horrible bug that's causing some big problem. Wouldn't you have to submit a new version to Apple, which then needs to get approved by them?

All that being said, there's risks with any POS system since it's pretty much mission critical. When I launched my company and did a Show HN, some people thought it was a bad idea (it's web-based). There's a lot of what ifs you can bring up that all sound terrible to a business owner. I'm sure a lot of people will go with iPad POS systems, I'm just wondering if there's a good reason to or if it's just the cool thing to do.

My startup is in point-of-sale as well (retail, not hospitality). I'm curious as to why you chose to go with iOS? I'm not saying it's a good or bad choice, but it definitely is the current fad in the POS market. I'm focused on the lower end and small businesses, so I try to work with hardware they already have. How receptive are people to using iPods and iPads, cost wise?

Another question is.. what happens if a server spills a drink on it? :)

Now for an answer instead of another question. For marketing I would focus on finding a scalable sales method that is as self-serve as possible (small biz owners will always want to talk no matter how hard you try though). It's easy and tempting to go 'door to door' and sell one at a time, but economically it doesn't make sense. That's one place iOS helps, distribution through the app store. But you'll eventually need to find people who are generally looking for POS, not just specifically an iPad POS.

Anyways, good luck it looks interesting!

http://www.cashierlive.com - We provide SaaS point-of-sale to retailers. We launched last February, and we're working in River North.

You could always use Arc :)

Code: https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/news.arc

Instructions: https://github.com/nex3/arc/blob/master/how-to-run-news

Welcome to the club, my company Cashier Live (http://www.cashierlive.com) has been at this for about a year now. We're focused on retail, and from what I can see here you're focused on restaurant/quick serve. This is a great idea to help get your payments product adopted.

One thing you'll run in to when you have merchants actually using this is a crushing load of feature requests and support. Since you're using Authorize.net for card payments, right away you'll have store owners complaining that their fees are higher than they used to be. (Maybe that's good for you, just tell them to use FaceCash) We've integrated directly with a few of the processing networks now to get around that. This will be a great tool for getting people on board with FaceCash, but you'll have to keep support/dev in mind or you'll be dragged away from it.

When I did a Show HN a year back, connectivity was one of the big question marks from everyone. I can report back that you'd be surprised how much of a non-issue it really is. MiFi cards and wireless hotspots are an almost bulletproof backup, it might be a bit slower but the store is open for business. With traditional POS, card processing is down when their connection is down so they're just as bad off as a web-based pos.

Point-of-sale software is well suited for SaaS, despite what many think, so I'm not surprised to see another join the club. Aaron: If you plan on sticking to restaurants/QSR shoot me an e-mail, have an idea I'd like to run past you.

Not sure where to even start on this one. Spec work sucks, it wastes designer's time and the end product often doesn't turn out great because they have an incentive to spend as little time as possible.

But I have to say, this is even worse. Looking at point #4, they actively went out and tried to get as many designers as possible to do free work for them. From their post:

"The response rate was staggering, with around 85% responding and almost an equal amount actually submitting designs. The most time effective way to do this is to download an auto-text completer which allows you to save a message and quickly populate any document with it by selecting a shortcut."

Congratulations, you just figured out how to minimize your time spent while maximizing the hours wasted by the 'losing' designers. Or, in their own words... "For a minimal amount you are able to tap the creative abilities and talents of a multitude of people across the world. Why pay one designer 10 times more for a product you may not like?"

Edit: Not looking to get into a back in forth here, so I would recommend this to anyone who thinks design contests are a good idea: http://www.no-spec.com/faq

Love the site, unfortunately I'm definitely not in your target market :) One quick & easily implemented suggestion for you: put your phone number in a more prominent place.

My company targets business owners as well, and at first I buried our phone number on the contact or about page. After talking with some customers I decided to not only make it more prominent, but to put it at the top of every page. Best change I ever made, the conversion rate of people who call us is astronomical.

Business owners, especially ones in 'offline' industries, often want to hear your voice before they decide to work with you. Anyways thats just my 2 cents, congrats on the launch!

I'm guessing they're part of the "Other Investors" chunk, along with a lot of others.

For publications, I think you'd be safe in using their logo as long as you were legitimately in the publication. Some sort of editorial content, not advertising.

For users, I'm in the "it's better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission" camp. I've only had one company ask that their logo be taken down, mostly because they didn't want their competitors to know they were using us. You might even want to A/B test to see if having that on the page helps. If it doesn't improve conversions then it's probably not worth the risk of an angry customer.

That being said, you might get more value out of asking for a testimonial than just putting a logo up. I recently did that and ended up having a few fall off the wagon due to needing higher-up permission. But the one's I got made it worthwhile.

That's because they were done by the same people, take a look at their 'portfolio' on Dribbble - it's really impressive: http://dribbble.com/softfacade

Side note to HNers, if you're in need of great design then I'd recommend perusing Dribbble. I've found a few freelancers there that have done some amazing work.

Full size can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/softfacade/5244241757

I think Prefinery is what you're looking for? http://www.prefinery.com

I also like the Pictos icon set, it has a set done in @font-face (in addition to standard PNG/vector sets).

http://pictos.drewwilson.com

I'd start by building a hypothesis of who your user would be - then go out and find some people that match that criteria. Landing pages & 'smoke tests' are some tools you can use to augment the info you gather, but you'll want to "get out of the building" and speak one on one with some potential users.

Also, when you're speaking with someone don't even bring up your product until the end. Focus on the problem that you're trying to solve.

I recently saw Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits speak, and would really recommend their book to anyone wanting to do customer development: http://www.custdev.com

That's funny, I actually use Basecamp for this right now. Specifically with the To-Do lists. I've never really had a problem with keeping track that way, interesting that they wanted something more dedicated to the task.

That being said, if they offered this as a product I'd get on board.

A friend just had this happen at his consulting company:

"Discrediting an employee's current company - Black hat recruiters will contact an employed potential candidate and tell them that their current company is in a precarious financial state and offer to find the employee another job. Black hat recruiters will even do this to employees of their own clients."

He let one of his employees go and they went to a recruiter to find a new job. Next thing you know, everyone at the company was getting called by him saying they were in financial trouble and that he could find them work.

A few days later he calls my friend up and says "I know you've been losing a few employees, I think I have some good candidates if you're hiring."

From my dealings with recruiters, this is almost standard practice.

My girlfriend and I use Kik, for us it was a BBM alternative after I got an Android phone.

And we've been using it longer than 15 days, so to me the headline/graph is misleading. They just released a complete overhaul so they reached a million users on v2 of their software, but how many did v1 have?

Agreed, it is a difficult challenge. I know because I'm working on it right now with my company, Cashier Live. We've thought about doing something like this in addition to working with options out there like Milo or Google's local product search, but it leads to the same problem they have now. Comprehensive search. If I (or VendHQ) did something like that, we'd only have independent stores and not the large chains.

That being said, I think Milo knows their weakness is in independent retail and it looks like they're taking steps to solve that.

Kind of off topic, but I'm not a fan of their re-branding. Perhaps there's some oDesk envy? (Rent a Coder is now vWorker for those that didn't click through)

That is a lot of talent, seemingly in stuff that Facebook doesn't really do. Any ideas on what they're up to over there?

I don't know if the world needs another browser, but maybe Facebook is working on one?

I wonder what will happen with the SDK and the cost of licensing. I was hoping to use RedLaser in an upcoming project so it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out.

I'm not sure what was used here, but I've used Voices.com before to source voice overs and have been really happy with it. Worth a look if you need something like that.

You would think that DST, who's invested tons of money in both Zynga and Facebook, would try to keep the peace here. I read they're pretty hands off though.

Zynga helps Facebook by keeping people on the site and giving them a reason to come back. Facebook gives Zynga a huge audience to tap into. If Zynga goes off on its own I don't see it helping either one.

I'd be happy though, less Farmville spam to deal with.

That does seem a bit high but I wouldn't say that it's impossible. If someone is going to spend hundreds on a device that's meant soley for reading, they probably read a lot of books.

Anecdotally, I just got an iPad and bought 3 books I've been meaning to read for a while. Before that, I hadn't bought a book in months. In a way it's like the app store but for books - looking for and buying a book was so easy that I'll probably buy more than if I had to go to the store every time.

In most cases the only time a signature gets looked at is if someone is contesting a charge. The CC processor would ask the store for a record showing that they actually made a purchase.

In the end, signatures are really there to protect the store not you. It's in their best interest to have you sign with your actual signature. If you signed as Donald Duck and then contested the charge they'd probably have a hard time proving it was you and they'd lose money.

At the top it says "JASON BAPTISTE notes:"

If you click on 'notes' it links to the comment on HN