Posts Tagged ‘credit cards’

Square, the startup that lets mobile vendors take credit card payments through their phones has taken a jab at competitors by dropping its $0.15 per transaction fee.

Now Square says it will charge a flat 2.75% of any transaction, regardless of size. The goal is to make payments easier for users and combat hidden fees commonly seen in the credit card industry, according to General Manager Keith Rabois.

“In the end accepting payments should be as easy as using a microwave,” Rabois told TechCrunch.

Competitors such as Intuit’s GoPayment system charge the flat 15 cent fee per transaction in addition to taking a percentage cut.

Payments via the internet have necessarily been growing less and less complicated, and more and more mobile. Shoppers can send and receive payments via PayPal on their phones, they can send money via Twitter, and a technology called Near Field Communication will let people zap money into the pockets of vendors by simply waving their mobile devices over a receiver.

Mobile credit card payment startup Square, whose card reading service works with a nifty magnetic card reader that plus into a mobile device’s headphone jack, is missing a very important piece: The patent for the hardware.

Square, Inc. and founder Jim McKelvey filed a complaint against Robert Morley, Jr., an associate professor of electrical engineering at Washington University, claiming that he neglected to list McKelvey as co-inventor of the device.

According to the story told McKelvey, a glass artist and entrepreneur, he came up with the idea for a mobile card reader in 2009 after losing a sale because he couldn’t accept credit card payments. He then teamed up with friend and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and they decided to use a mobile phone’s headphone jack as a way of interfacing with a card reading device. McKelvey then turned to friend Morley to help design the prototype hardware.

The three reportedly had discussed obtaining a patent once the prototype was finished, but Morley filed solo in June 2009, and a patent in his name for the card reader device was granted on October 12, 2010.   Read more