By: Steph Dlugon
Back in March, when the iPhone 3.0 OS beta version first came out, there was a lot of talk about the potential to plug in peripheral devices that would use software installed on the phone to interact with external hardware devices.
Organizations in the medical monitoring business were vocal about the endless possibilities. For example, devices like blood pressure cuffs and glucose monitors could plug into the phone, and send results directly to a physician’s office.
The enthusiasm for such devices quietly died down over the following months, but now a new device developed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is bound to create major buzz.
The device is simply called Square, and it turns mobile devices like the iPhone or iPod Touch into a credit card payment system. An article on gigaom.com explains how it works.
“It’s essentially a small magnetic reader that plugs into the headphone jack of an iPhone. When a credit card (or a debit card) is swiped through the reader, it reads the data and converts it into an audio signal. The microphone picks up the audio, sends it through the processors and then is routed to Square’s software application on the iPhone. From there the encrypted data is transmitted using either Wi-Fi (for iPod touch) or a 3G Internet connection to back-end severs, which in turn communicate with the payment networks to complete the transactions.
“We don’t store any information on the devices,” Dorsey said. And because this tiny white reader, which is small enough to hook up on a keychain, uses the headphone jack, Square can work with any device: Android, BlackBerry, Symbian Phones and even computers. “As long as we have software on that device, our reader works,” said Dorsey. Right now, they only have software for the iPhone & iPod touch.”
The job listing page on the company’s (SquareUp) website indicates that they are looking for Android and Blackberry developers.
