iPhone Squared

What an age in which we live. My parents remember the days before they owned a television. My mother literally came to the U.S. on a boat in the 1940s.

There is a new app, called Square, created by the co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, that turns one's iPhone (and other smartphones, in the future) into a credit card reader and payment system. Reading the following article is pretty hilarious for  someone with a seriously Irish name like me (Colin Patrick O'Higgins). The major players are the aforementioned Mr. Dorsey, Jim McKelvey, and Tristan O'Tierney. Sounds more like a drinking team than a group of enginerds! So, an Irishman, an Indian, and an Asian walk into a bar...I'm getting off track.

Here's a blurb from the article. So simple. I can't believe I didn't think of it. From GigaOm - 


What Is Square?
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.