Cheshire Cat Photo Blog(...said the Cat: 'we're all mad here....')

“So we looked at it. Ninety percent of the U.S. has moved to credit cards, but it’s still very difficult to accept them.” Jack Dorsey, Twitter creator

Way back in October, I wrote about what I consider to be a brilliant answer to the need for better credit card-processing solutions.

In a word: Square.

Today, Twitter creator, Jack Dorsey, gave the first public demonstration of his venture, in Paris, France! Dorsey revealed that the hardware device, a roughly cubic gizmo that plugs into the headphone socket of most mobile devices, and which (with accompanying software) allows the scanning of credit cards, would be given away, for free. Dorsey did not explain how he would make money from the creation, other than that there would be a per-transaction charity donation. After the magnetic strip of a credit card is read by the hardware cube, customers would use their finger to sign for the transaction on a phone’s touch-sensitive screen.

The device, which is scheduled for launch on the iPnone and iPod in March of 2010, was inspired by the “immediacy, approachability and transparency” of Twitter and the global economic crisis, which has exposed a need for a radical rethinking of the financial sector, according to Dorsey.

According to Dorsey, cell phone cameras and character recognition software were once considered.

“The other thing we looked at is the audio jack — and it’s on Macbooks, desktop PCs, BlackBerries and Androids. We built this hardware. It’s a self-powered swiper. Powered by the magnetic power of the swipe itself, converts it to an audio signal, which the software interprets.”

Dorsey is beta testing Square in small businesses in a handful of major cities in the U.S., and Dorsey’s developers are working to ensure that the device is “fraud proof.”

-Bill at

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