iPhone becomes a Credit Card Terminal

There are a lot of iPhone applications in the Apple App Store but most of them are games (something like 60 - 70%) and of those that are not there's not much to look at. It actually reminds me of all the gadgets and widgets that were introduced when Google Gadgets and Yahoo! Widgets became popular for a while (2005 - 2007). Lots of choices but not much substance.

Today, however, I heard about an iPhone application that acts as a credit card terminal. Pictured to the left the iPhone credit card terminal application, developed and sold by innerfence, allows you to enter a person's credit card number, expiration date, transaction amount, and zip code and you can get an authorization for their card and charge for goods. Bad cards? No worries, if its not active than the authorization won't go through!

This is going to be priceless for vendors on the go. For example, at the Minneapolis Art fair every year artists (the good ones) might sell tens of thousands of dollars in art. They all take credit cards but they use the old carbon paper and mechanical swipe machines. Very 1980's. There is no way for an artist to know if the charge will go though when they call it in later after the event is over. Another one is cab companies. The few cities were cabs have credit card processing machines, the driver has to give up 5% of the fair to use them. That sucks. However, if the cab companies allows drivers to use their iPhone they can save a lot of money in fees and the driver can stop getting gutted every time a charge card is used.

The innerfence Authorize.NET service costs something like $50.00 per month with no transaction, set up, or minimum transactions fee. It's a dream for any road warrior merchant!

Btw - the gateway service that does the authorization using SSL can be used without an iPhone. I think its about time we wrote a Surface application that accesses that gateway. Now we are really talking about doing business with Surface!