Jack Dorsey, the guy who built Twitter in two weeks is now silently working on a mobile payment system called Squirrel. That’s all we knew about it so far, but thanks to Engadet, we have more information regarding his new venture and how things work.
Dorsey’s new company is called Self Edge NYC, and the product is named as Square iPhone Payment System hosted at SquareUp.com. Basically, it’s a small plastic dongle which fits into the headphone jack of an iPhone or iPod Touch. It has the ability to read data from Credit Cards and transfer it to the iPhone application of the same.
A customer has to swipe his card over the dongle, and the staff will tell the application how much to charge the customer. The customer then reviews it, and confirms it by using a hand gesture over his signature and fills his email address to send the receipt. Square will process the payment and transfer funds to the store’s bank account directly. They’ll charge a small percentage, and/or a fixed fee for processing the payment. Customer’s receipt will include a map of the location where the transaction was done, which makes it extremely easy to keep track of your spending and file receipts wisely.
This revelation comes from Engadget! They noticed squareup.com on system’s receipts. Checking the whois information of that domain exposed its contact information as billing [AT] paybysquirrel.com. This is how link between Dorsey’s Squirrel and Square were found.
Personally, I don’t see a reason why I’d prefer an iPhone-based Point of Sale terminal instead of the regular ones. But this thing sure has its own potential. Anything iPhone is uber-cool these days.
Discussion
Comments for “Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey’s New iPhone Payment Project”