By I was one of those guys who were amazed by Square when they first brought their product to the forefront. Imagine being able to use your mobile phone to take credit card transactions on the go? The service would be useless for me personally as I don’t really have anything of quality to sell to anyone with any bit of sense, but a ton of small business owners have found this the handiest tool of them all.
Intuit – the folks who probably handle your taxes during tax season if you don’t go to H&R Block – has made a solution of their own to compete with Square. They’re calling it GoPayment and the premise is exactly the same. You take an adapter that plugs into your 3.5mm headphone jack and have your customer swipe their credit card to pay for whatever you ring up on the app.
Upon swiping, the transaction is carried out and you then have an option to send them a receipt via text message or email. Simple, but very useful for those who can’t be bothered to carry around heavy credit card readers and who would rather use the device they’re already carrying. (Don’t expect to see bigger business carrying this, but you might run into one of these streets at a food cart or some other mobile/outside business.)
Intuit is a big name in the financial industry and they’re finally looking to mobile. They’ve already made their way to the Android market with their suite of tax-related apps (SnapTax, TaxCaster, MyTaxRefund), their personal finance app (Mint.com) and they already have a version of GoPayment for Android handsets. The tablet version isn’t expected to make its way to the Honeycomb-specific Android market until later this year. Watch our quick look at the device in the video above.
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