Posts Tagged ‘Jim McKelvey’

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

After facing a series of startup hiccups, Square Inc.’s mobile payment system, which we previously covered, is finally slated for a late summer rollout, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Square, the brainchild of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and artist Jim McKelvey, is a mobile app and dongle combo that allows users to receive credit and debit card payments on the go.

The company began testing its system with a small number of merchants in December, and had intended to host a general launch earlier this year. However the rollout was stymied by hardware delays and merchant complaints about Square’s draconian anti-fraud system.

Hardware issues were resolved relatively quickly after McKelvey went to China to straighten out manufacturing. However to fix the anti-fraud system, which placed limits on merchant transactions, and handle massive demand, Square needs to restructure it’s whole underwriting system to mitigate risk.

“This is the last thing preventing us from shipping readers as fast as we’d like, and we have pretty much the entire team working on it,” Dorsey wrote in an email to Square users back in June.

When it finally launches, Square promises to be a very slick system, but nobody loves vaporware. And since the Square software app is currently available, but the hardware card reader is not, comments on the iOS and Android app stores indicate that customers are quickly losing confidence.