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Square's personalized prepaid card is available to everyone
Digital payment service Square has been inviting customers to sign up for its prepaid debit card since May, and is now opening up the program to everyone. On Thursday, the company announced the Square Cash Card is available to order via the Square app or website.
Square to introduce digital customer loyalty cards for merchants
If there's a big name in the low-cost mobile payment market right now, it's Square. The company has quickly grabbed the attention and business of companies that want to accept payments, but don't want to pay the ridiculously high rates charged by credit card companies. Today Square is announcing new services, including a loyalty and reward program for merchants. With the loyalty program, customers get a virtual punch card in the Pay with Square mobile app. With each visit to a participating merchant, customers can follow their progress to a reward. Merchants can provide special discounts or free merchandise with a first purchase as a reward for new customers, and regular customers can get rewards based on total amount spent or number of visits. Square is also providing merchants who use the Square Register iPad app with much more detailed analytics on sales, breaking those sales down by hours, time of day, and day of week. Merchants will also have an idea who their most productive sellers are, and inventory management is now expanded to include categories of items. On the payer side, the Pay with Square app now includes an easier way for customers to find local businesses that take Square for payment.
Square and Apple have plans for Monday
If you follow @jack, otherwise known as Twitter co-founder and current Square CEO Jack Dorsey, then you'll know that at about 2 PM EDT today, he tweeted the cryptic Instagram (a company he's invested in) message and photo shown at right. A square with apples in it -- that's pretty obvious there, Jack. Square card readers are currently selling in Apple retail stores, but it appears that there's more to the story. The company has a press conference scheduled for 10 AM PDT at its headquarters in San Francisco, and Dorsey's hint looks like a not-so-subtle message that the two companies are going to announce something big. I speculated yesterday that Apple could be planning to use Square card readers with the Apple Retail iPads that are being rolled out, or perhaps Square and Apple have other plans up their respective sleeves. Fortunately, the announcement is just two days away and not life-changing, so we can all rest easy over this beautiful spring (or fall in the Southern Hemisphere) weekend.
Dispute over Square card reader patent gets litigious
As folks who follow such things may be aware, there's been some dispute over the origin of Square's card reader technology more or less since the company (led by Twitter's Jack Dorsey) went public with it last year. That dispute has now gotten even more contentious, however, with Square and its chairman, James McKelvey, taking aim at REM Holdings and Robert Morley, who actually holds the patent to the technology. The key issue is that McKelvey is not listed as one of the inventors in the patent, despite claims that he was the one that actually conceived the idea in a "flash of inventive insight," and that he and Morley worked together to develop the idea (and later discussed obtaining patent protection with Jack Dorsey). And that's pretty much where things stand at the moment -- Square is requesting a court order to add McKelvey as a co-inventor on the patent, but there's no indication as to when or if that will happen.
