Last month, Square, the venture from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, added a credit card swipe reader to the headphone port of an iPhone . And Now, VeriFone announced PAYware Mobile, a combination iPhone/iPod touch app and swipe card reader that will enable merchants to accept and process credit cards on the move.
Payware mobile widget is scheduled to ship in January and will be free with a 2-year contract with VeriFone . The reader is supposed to encrypt credit card data in hardware so that the iPhone never sees the raw card number, and the app will capture signatures using a stylus (at least that’s how it’s illustrated now). Check out the video below for a brief demo.
It should be very interesting to see how these two hybrid solutions make their moves into the payment ecosystem. Square seems to be aiming at more ad-hoc usage (artists, coffeehouses, etc.) for people who don’t have merchant accounts, but VeriFone is all about big retail. More importantly, the backing of VeriFone means this mobile payment peripheral has some pretty important backing and should be able to hit the ground running.
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Though this is good enough, this is Not the Future of payment! What do you think?