Breville BTM800XL from Chris Pacowski on Vimeo.

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For more pictures you can see my flickr feed.  Just click here for my s2k meetup pictures.

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Digital Changes

Square, which is founded by Jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founder), is a company that is looking to use a small square dongle that you attach to your iPhone and the digital conversion from the magnetic strip gets converted to a digital signal the phone's special Square software can read.

These dongles cost next to nothing but allow a great new access to the mobile credit processing world.  Not only can small business use this product without all the expensive hardware associated with credit card machines, but it also will allow these small business to process transactions anywhere, giving GPS locations and a signature pad to the consumer and the business owner.  They can even email their receipts to themselves so that they don't have to print out cumbersome (and wasteful) receipts.

Security

The problem or fear many face with digital transactions is that of digital theft.  With Square, they require a digital signature which you sign with your finger, then it also takes into account your GPS location.  They are even working on a digital picture that goes along with the credit card (which it pulls from the credit card companies website) to confirm the person who's card it is actually resembles your customer (I used to be blonde and 150 lbs heavier, I swear!).  This is also more secure because a signature can be copied, while if an image of the cardholder is stored with the credit card company it becomes very hard to replicate in the real world. Some  newer cards even have images stored in an RFID chip on the card itself.

Even the signature can be improved to include a tip or perhaps even in the future show a image of the company your purchasing from (almost like a PayPal verified merchant).

Uses

As a guy who primarily uses a credit card, I sometimes find it hard to go out with friends without cash because the restaurants always have an issue with taking my credit card.  So it would be really nice to have this for myself as a form of fund transfer You can already do this with PayPal by transferring funds to friends or family, but its a hassle and the person needs to have a PayPal account.  If you could eliminate that issue and allow them to take payment via a credit card, you could take payments virtually, from any of your friends.  Or you could also take payments from a group of people for something like dinner, or even an event your having (IE a house party).  The restaurant won't split the check?  Won't take more than one credit card?  Have everyone just swipe your card and give me your share.  The one issue I see with this type of fund transfer is the credit card companies are in it for the money, they want a percentage of the money being exchanged.  So this percentage is passed on to you as the owner of the credit card processor (Square).  It's usually a small amount, something usually under 3%, but for something you trade with a friend (perhaps you bought your friends TV), is now a digital transaction in which you lose 3%.  Not that big of a deal on $10, but on $1000 3% is now $30 lost.  Plus any other fees they charge you monthly for using the service (usually with transactions or not).  If they can somehow overcome this issue of charging for personal transactions (which I highly doubt they will), maybe then this ideal will be a bit more functional for the public as a form of fund transfer. (Please note, at the time of this article, they have not officially announced how the payment structure will be so I am unsure of the exact numbers)  But the really nice thing is there isn't a charge from the company for hardware or from what I understand software.

For now this gives small merchants a VERY easy way to take digital purchases.  I'd even be ok with giving this to my very non-technical mother to use for her business.  Easy to use products are key if you want to capture a large portion of the market.  I'll leave you with a video of Kevin Rose and his YouTube video of the use of the Square product.

P.S. Don't forget to check out the Square website

Related Links:

https://squareup.com/

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/18/square-payment-dongle-demoed-for-iphone-toting-hippies-and-you/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coins

Updated on 1-26-2010

Ease Of Use

As an avid mobile phone user, I am always anticipating the next "greatest phone ever".  However, I have yet to find a phone that can do everything I want, the way I want it to.  There are tons of phones that do the things I want, but they don't do them very well.  For example, the iPhone is a great multimedia phone and they do a great job of having developers create new "apps" for the phone, but as a business device it isn't very good.  I hate not seeing my calendar (yes, I could jailbreak the phone and get it to show up on the unlock screen but jailbroken phones are too much work),  as well as the fact that I don't like typing on it, due to lack of touch response.  I, personally, need that tactile feel of a keyboard or at least the fake keyboard that vibrates the phone when you touch a key.  The iPhone does do a great job of keeping all my music together and letting me play it in a clear way (even though iTunes is HUGE pain and loses files and moves music inconsistently around on my PC).  Windows Mobile always had a spot in my heart for keeping me organized, with my calendar always front and center when I turned on the phone and it was easy to create new appointments.  On the other hand, Windows Mobile does not play or store music well.  The backend of the OS was always messy and felt unfinished. Not to mention the OS is a hog on memory and resources, forcing you to clear the memory cache (sorry, but I shouldn't have to do this 3+ times a day).  The Blackberry OS is good for email and surfing the web, but that's it.  Its user interface is a mess and new users are not easily welcomed to the cold, mechanical interface.  Symbian was a good, simple phone interface.  It didn't do much good, but making phone calls was easy.  There are other smaller mobile phone makers many have never heard of, like the company "Else" (formerly Emblaze Mobile).  Their first phone is oddly called First Else.  The interface is a beautiful, simple interface that uses only one finger to access any part of the device.  This new OS looks stunning, and I would love to use it on my phone. The problem? I can't give up my current phone because I'm afraid the interface wouldn't work for me.

Multiple Interfaces

If small companies (hardware or software) want to make it in the phone industry they are going to need to ensure that they are widely adopted by consumers.  Consumers are not always easy to understand, but they fear change, and most people don't want to adopt new things.  That correlates into a lack of new customers and a stable, meager market share. Sometimes a need comes along that outweighs this fear of change, such as a phone breaking, or requiring the device to do something new (as a want or even a necessity).  So if small companies want to break into the phone industry they will need one of two things: a lot of money, or a new idea that changes the way people use their product.

With the iPhone, Apple had both.  They had a phone that incorporated a media player well, and introduced apps that opened up the accessibility of the phone to other companies, on top of the fact they had a ton of money backing their new product).  Else has a great looking phone and its interface is stunning, however, they won't sell anything if consumers don't have a need or want to adopt their product.  As the end user fears change, they won't want to adopt the First Else product because it's different from what they know.  Maybe Else could pair with another manufacturer/OS to create a phone that dual boots two operating systems.  Computers have been doing this forever, and while it is usually left to the more advanced users, even HP does this with the majority of their laptops.  They have a "quick start" product for playing movies and music while only powering the hard drive, screen, and part of the processor/ram instead of the whole unit.  This allows them to have a very simple interface that can access a couple key features while staying lighter on the battery usage. Most customers don't even know that they are dual-booting multiple operating systems, and the ease of use makes it easy for the user to adopt this extra feature.  Personally, I would love a phone that I could use for business during the day, then at night, or the weekend, hell, any time I want, switch to a interface that's more personal and not so industrial. I would simply be in heaven (well, maybe just in a happy place).  This use of two OS' would allow me to step away from work while only using one product to carry around all day.

Now some people say that we don't have the hardware to do such a thing, that is simply incorrect new snapdragon processors are over 1Ghz  and we are cramming 768mb of memory into some phones, without even making the phones overly thick (a great example of this is the HTC - HD2).  If small companies are going to make it, they are going to need to do something to get into the industry and become adaptable my many.  Even the big boys are going to need to start adapting new ideas to improve market share.

Stand Alone Hardware

Google recently announced that they would be selling a phone without any contracts and without any connection to phone carriers.  In Europe and Japan this practice has been in place for a long while now, however their markets are different as they only run GSM and we have 3 different mobile platforms.  In Europe and Japan carriers fight to get customers simply by their phones and services, because the tower technology is all GSM based technologies and they are set to one standard for all the different phone companies.  But Google has the funds to pay for a gamble like this and not care if they loose whatever they put into this project.  Even with the offset higher costs of selling a phone outright, Google can still sell their phones without contract and not make a lot of money on the actual hardware while finding other ways to gain revenue.  But some companies don't want to take that kind of risk, HTC is a great example of this, the majority of their phones sold in the US are sold as contact as a carrier phone (branded by that carrier, IE AT&T Tilt or Tilt2 are HTC phones).  HTC do skin their phones to look better, mostly Window Mobile.  The issue with this is that the bloated Window Mobile interface is still behind the front screen, while you can dump money into better processors and memory, you still don't solve the back-end problem.

Short And Sweet

So in short companies need to change the way they look at hardware if they want their software to work long term.  Specifically companies who are hurting to people like Apple.  Small companies need to find ways to work with big companies to get their name out into the public or they will find it very difficult to gain any market share.  Big companies need to start looking at their problems and fixing them, rather than throwing money at the problems and hoping that the problems will fix themselves.  America is at the heart of this issue, were not going to be able to get out of this technology slum unless we start to become innovative again, sometimes even working with our 'enemies' to create more market share.

**UPDATE**

On January 26th, mobilitydigest.com recently said there will be a dual boot Windows Mobile and Android system!  Follow the link here!

Recommended Links

http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/24/emblazes-first-else-unveiled-in-london-promises-to-be-a-game-c/

http://www.firstelse.com/

http://www.htc.com/europe/product/hd2/overview.html

http://www.htc.com/europe/product/hero/overview.html