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Square Announces New Consumer Initiative: Pay With Your Name

Mobile payments startup Square announced a new consumer initiative Monday that allows customers who frequent businesses using the Square card reader to pay with just their names.

The Square Card Case — a mobile loyalty card holder — turns the Square application into a complete mobile payment solution, CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey explained during a press event at the startup’s San Francisco headquarters.

Each individual card in the case gives the carrier access to a venue’s entire menu, which is updated in real time, and highlights the most popular products in the store, based on sales. The customer can tap to use or view his “tab,” with the tab containing a digital record of all his past transactions at the venue.

The new payment system boils down to a modern day mobile version of telling the cashier, “Put it on my tab.” The user can locate a participating venue via the application’s “Explore Places” directory and then use just his name to checkout, no wallet required. The receipt is attached to the user’s loyalty card for that particular location.

SEE ALSO: How Square’s New Pay-With-Your-Name System Works [PICS]

Businesses using the Square Register, the startup’s updated payment software for iPad, will have the user on file and can select him from the point-of-sale screen to charge the transaction to the user’s “tab.”

Fifty merchants in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., will begin accepting the new payment option.

Square, says Dorsey, is the only company in the world to link customers to places and transactions in this fashion. He sees the Square Card Case as a complete mobile payments solution that bests those (think Starbucks Card Mobile) already in existence.

The press event kicked off with Dorsey explaining the history of Square — it was started with the realization that everyone pays with credit cards — and sharing a few examples of how its card reader is proving to be disruptive.

Dorsey says Square has shipped out more than 500,000 card readers, is seeing $1 million in purchases per month and is processing $1 billion in gross payment volume annualized.

Dorsey has been hinting at today’s news, tweeting a few clues in anticipation of the press event.

Square, reportedly valued at more than $240 million after its $27.5 million round of financing, continues to process record transaction amounts. In late April, the startup processed more than $2 million in transactions on a Friday — then its highest single-day transaction figure. This past Saturday, however, Square set a new record: $3 million processed in a single day.

Apple sells Square’s credit card reader in 235 U.S. retail stores and online.

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Here’s One Major Advantage Amazon’s Tablets Will Have Over The iPad (AMZN)



Jeff Bezo Amazon Tablet

Last week we learned from BGR that Amazon’s upcoming tablets will come in both 7 and 10-inch models.

Now reports are coming out about pricing, and it’s a lot better than what Apple has to offer with the iPad.

The 7-inch tablet will cost $349 and the 10-inch tablet will cost $449. Unlike most iPad competitors, it looks like Amazon is looking at a cheaper pricing structure which should help it compete. (Assuming the specs are as good as we hear.)

The pricing rumors come from PC Mag, which has sources close to the issue in Taiwan.

It makes sense. Amazon is known for offering great hardware and software at affordable prices. (Like the $114 ad-supported Kindle and the Amazon Appstore that offers free premium Android apps.)

Even if it means Amazon will lose money by offering the tablets for so cheap, it could give the company a greater chance at gaining a significant marketshare in the long run.

Don’t Miss: 10 Things Amazon’s Tablet Must Have In Order To Crush The iPad

 

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SCVNGR Founder Burns His Ships and Takes on Groupon

Alexander the Great once set his own warships ablaze to ensure there would be no backing down from a pivotal attack on the Persian army. It was either conquer the enemy or swim home. Nearly 2,300 years later, SCVNGR founder Seth Priebatsch isn’t looking to take over the world. Instead, he wants to build game layers atop it. But he wants to follow Alexander’s example just the same, and he’s already making money doing it.

“I’m a big believer in that ‘burn your ships before facing the Persians’ metaphor. If you’re going to do a startup, don’t half-ass it,” says Priebatsch. Rather than igniting a fleet of ships, the SCVNGR founder dropped out of Princeton at age 19 to try to create a similar high-stakes, all-or-nothing atmosphere for his startup.

Now 22, the Boston-based entrepreneur — who describes himself as “extremely unbalanced” — often sleeps in his tricked out, 26,000-square-foot, industrial office space, which houses his 44 employees (and 30 summer interns) and comes complete with moving walls and nine bamboo gardens. He has no girlfriend, no dog, not even a goldfish. “I do have a pet robot,” says the startup founder,” but I don’t have to feed it.”

And while he probably won’t be invited to speak at any seminars on work/life balance any time soon, it’s hard to argue with the results his focus has achieved. Eighteen months after its launch, the Google Ventures-backed startup is doing something few venture-backed startups are doing: making money. According to Priebatsch, the company made its first million dollars in revenue over a six-month period in 2010, and matched that within the first six weeks of 2011.

In a nutshell, SCVNGR tries to deepen experiences at locations by creating simple game-like challenges for its members when they check in.  It now has more than 3,000 enterprise clients — from Coca-Cola to the U.S. Navy — that are building challenges for users on the mobile platform. And while large corporations pay to use the SCNVGR platform, consumers and small businesses can build on it for free, although that might change as the company looks to add new features.

Meanwhile, Priebatsch has also been forging ahead with a second venture to build a “deal-layer on top of the world.” With LevelUp, SCVNGR is competing with local deal programs like Groupon and Living Social by offering a series of three deals to consumers, who unlock each one as they try out a business. Encouraging customer loyalty is radically different new twist to the daily-deal market.

Two months into a pilot program in Philadelphia and Boston, LevelUp says it has about 200 SMBs offering deals to 100,000 registered users, divided equally between the two eastern cities. The company said its high-watermark for a daily deal has been 1,400 takers. ”By volume, we are already in the top three players in Boston and Philadelphia,” Priebatsch said. “[On] any given day, it’s Groupon, LivingSocial, LevelUp … which is pretty sweet.”

Although he wouldn’t say how many people have purchased from the site, the company did share some initial data on customer loyalty and its new daily-deal offers: 50 percent of LevelUp users who have purchased Level 1 have ‘leveled up’ to Level 2, it said, and 20 percent of users who have purchased Levels 1 and 2 have already ‘leveled up’ to Level 3.

Priebatsch says he knows LevelUp is having some success, because it’s irritating his competitors. “I always know I’m doing my job right when I get hate mail from people whose businesses I’m affecting,” he said. “When we launched LevelUp and three weeks in I got hate mail from some of the folks at Groupon and Living Social … I was like, ‘check. Doing my job.” The emails weren’t mean, he added, but were evidence that “we are causing disruption in Boston and Philly.”

And what about his unbalanced approach to this competition? “If you are a 20-something and you’re just dropping out of college, be balanced later,” he said. “Now is the time to be completely lopsided and run with it.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Steve Evans and Tech Cocktail

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