This reminds me of "The Future of eBusiness" from 1999 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnwaFxFru5k Funny it took so long to get here, and that Square beat IBM to market :)
The End of the Credit Card? New Square app: Card Case
31–40 of 141 posts
Re: The End of the Credit Card? New Square app: Card Case
#32What happens when your chilling in a coffee shop and your arch nemesis orders a latte with your name?
Carefully take out the blow dart gun...
Re: The End of the Credit Card? New Square app: Card Case
#33Very cool.
This also brings with it a new source of analytics and marketing opportunities (for better or worse?).
A coffee shop cashier could be told (through product suggestions on the iPad they use) that you've missed your regular lunch up the street and to offer you something to eat.
Online ads could now be targeted towards you further, based off what you purchased in the real world (that coffee and muffin) because the purchase was matched to you, and your iOS Device ID.
A new round of marketing is possible by tying in real world/daily purchases and being able to push that information back to retailers (in the form of product recommendations or analytics for them), as well as advertisers.
Re: The End of the Credit Card? New Square app: Card Case
#34It's ironic to see this article coming from Farhad Manjoo.
I wrote a response to his original piece a while ago:
http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=51
What Square has done with card case is pretty slick, but at present it doesn't scale. Paying with your name doesn't work at Wal-mart. And funding with your plastic credit or debit card doesn't work especially well for most coffee shops or other small businesses that want to save on interchange fees, not pay more of them.
I look forward to competing with Square again when I get my California license.
Re: The End of the Credit Card? New Square app: Card Case
#35The Square dongle is the most brilliant customer acquisition tool in the history of marketing to small businesses. But Square probably needs to also offer a swiping solution that makes more sense in a permanent location like a physical store. And it should also acknowledge that customers are going to ask for a paper receipt for some period of time. Not every retailer is Apple.
Getting rid of the flat fee that traditionally accompanies credit card transactions was also a smart move to further open up new credit card processing markets.
The Card Case? I'm not sold in its current state. This article, like pretty much every article describing the latest "wouldn't it be great" payment product story, describes a process that sounds quite a bit worse than a simple swipe of a 2mm thick plastic card.
Re: The End of the Credit Card? New Square app: Card Case
#36This is amazing in terms of ease-of-use. However, the privacy implications are a bit worrying... I don't really want to rubbish this, I hate the naysayers when something disruptive comes around (note that Japan rolled out pay-by-cellphone on their subway systems something like 10 years ago) but... "She saw my name and photo on her iPad, tapped it, and I was done. A receipt was sent to my phone." So all employees at s…
Additionally, if you use the app, Square knows exactly where you are at all times.
That's absolutely not true, at least not on iOS. As mentioned in the article, Square is using the iOS geofencing APIs to wake the app when you enter a favorite area. The app isn't running in the background all the time.
Also, as mentioned in the article, you can turn this feature off and manually toggle the tab.
Re: The End of the Credit Card? New Square app: Card Case
#37The Square dongle is the most brilliant customer acquisition tool in the history of marketing to small businesses. But Square probably needs to also offer a swiping solution that makes more sense in a permanent location like a physical store. And it should also acknowledge that customers are going to ask for a paper receipt for some period of time. Not every retailer is Apple. Getting rid of the flat fee that traditi…
I wouldn't say they "got rid of the flat fee". They are offering an alternative. The flat fee is not about to go the way of the dinosaur- it is still the more favorable option for clients processing large transactions.
Re: The End of the Credit Card? New Square app: Card Case
#38> Paying for stuff with your phone sounds awesome until you stop to think about it. Uh, it doesn't sound awesome to me at all. It sounds annoying and frustrating. Swiping a credit card is already pretty simple. > then tell the cashier your name Yeah, because that works great. My name is fairly common, and cashiers still manage to get it wrong, especially if it's noisy. Also, what happens when three "John Smiths" walk…
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Re: The End of the Credit Card? New Square app: Card Case
#39It's ironic to see this article coming from Farhad Manjoo. I wrote a response to his original piece a while ago: http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=51 What Square has done with card case is pretty slick, but at present it doesn't scale. Paying with your name doesn't work at Wal-mart. And funding with your plastic credit or debit card doesn't work especially well for most coffee shops or other small b…
Why wouldn't it scale to Wal-mart? Even with a dozen people with the same name in the store, a cashier can quickly pick a matching face: everyone is good at that (except for prosopagnosics).
And that's without assuming Wal-mart adds any extra hardware that could narrow the position of handhelds to individual registers.
Re: The End of the Credit Card? New Square app: Card Case
#40This is amazing in terms of ease-of-use. However, the privacy implications are a bit worrying... I don't really want to rubbish this, I hate the naysayers when something disruptive comes around (note that Japan rolled out pay-by-cellphone on their subway systems something like 10 years ago) but... "She saw my name and photo on her iPad, tapped it, and I was done. A receipt was sent to my phone." So all employees at s…
You saw the 100 foot radius bit, but ignore the sentence before. It's an opt-in solution -- If you don't want it, don't opt in.
First, you need to turn on auto-payments for each individual store where you’d like to use it—it’s impossible to tell Card Case to turn on auto-payments for every store in San Francisco.