Square rolls out mobile sales register software to firms worldwide

From Reuters

“Square, a mobile payments firm founded by Jack Dorsey, one of the creators of Twitter, is rolling out software worldwide that allows businesses to track sales, inventories and other data on smartphones and tablets.

Square Register, which is available on Google's Android and on Apple platforms, is a mobile application that shops and other business use at the point of sale.

"The cash register was invented to solve the basic pain points of running a business, like recording sales," Dorsey said at a launch event in London on Thursday.

"Our Register empowers sellers to drill into their business with sophisticated reporting tools to run and grow their business."

The app will be available in English, Spanish, French and Japanese, and supports 130 currencies, the company said.”

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The unfortunate state of mobile payments

From The Stanford Daily

“The history of mobile payments is, upon initial examination, a puzzling one. There are very few ideas in the tech industry that are as clear in their potential utility as user-friendly contactless payment. Enabling technology like near-field communication (NFC) chips has been available for years in both smartphones and retail registers. Mobile payments promised not only to deliver a better user experience, but also to lower the transaction cost for merchants, provide a timely opportunity to ditch the fraud-prone credit card system that has been with us since the 1960s and rethink payment security from first principles.

So why is the history of mobile payments littered with the corpses of ambitious challengers? In the 16 years since the founding of PayPal, why can we still not pay at the Safeway checkout counter with our PayPal accounts? Google Wallet launched over three years ago and to date has failed to achieve any meaningful market penetration. Infamous Stanford startup Clinkle set out to create a revolutionary mobile payment system and ended up shipping a glorified rewards credit card. Meanwhile, Square’s IPO dreams were crushed by the reality that it remains unprofitable.”

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Apple Pay … same old same old …

Will Apple Pay be any better than what is already out there?

From The Economist

“Emptying pockets - Even Apple may not manage to replace wallets with mobile phones"

Try buying things exclusively via mobile payments and you will surely die, either of starvation or of a caffeine overdose. Coffee shops aside, hardly any restaurants or retailers allow customers to pay by waving a smartphone. That will soon change: on October 16th, just after The Economist went to press, Apple was expected to announce that, within days, the latest iPhone’s mobile-payment feature, Apple Pay, will start working in America. It lets users tap their phones on merchants’ terminals to make wireless payments.

Such technology has been around for years. It has failed to take off, however, in large part because so many firms have fingers in the mobile-payment pie, and often block others from grabbing a big piece of it. Google Wallet, a mobile-payment service that started up in 2011 to great fanfare, for a long time worked on only one of America’s four big wireless networks, Sprint. The other three have their own rival project, now called Softcard (it was named ISIS until events in the Levant forced a change). A consortium of big American retailers, such as Walmart and Target, also offers a mobile-payment service, called CurrentC, as does PayPal, whose main business is online payments. And then there are dozens of startups, from Stripe to Square, each with its own take on mobile payments.”

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Square adds invoicing to its register service

From Paymenteye

“Square has announced it has added Square Invoices to its robust register service. Sellers can get paid fast with free unlimited invoices and no monthly service fee.

Now sellers can accept payments in person, online in Square Market, and through Square Invoices for the same low 2.75% transaction price. Sellers can track all sales from their Square Dashboard, making it easy to manage all of their business operations from one place.

The online invoicing market is growing rapidly as businesses move away from traditional paper methods and look for more efficient ways to manage customer payments. Square Invoices eliminates the need to track customers down and take payments over the phone. With Square, sellers can now create custom invoices and collect payment securely from the same service they use to run their entire business.”

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Square's status? It's complicated

From CNN Money

“Even in an industry where things happen at Internet speed, the purported reversal of fortune at Square was remarkably fast. In seemingly no time, the mobile payments startup led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey went from darling to impending disaster. Square is a fast-growing but money-losing enterprise, reports proclaimed, with a high burn rate, shrinking balance sheet, and narrowing set of options.

But several interviews with Square executives, board members, and people close to the company - as well as a series of internal company e-mails obtained by Fortune - suggest a far more subtle narrative.

Square is certainly a company in transition. It has built a sizable and fast-growing payments business, which it is now trying to use as a springboard to expand into new and potentially more profitable areas. This week, the company introduced two new products intended to do just that. Success is hardly guaranteed, and the release comes in the wake of the failure of one of the company's high-profile products - Square Wallet.”

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