“Groupon has long said it wants to be known as more than a deals company. Now it’s showing how,” Jason Del Rey reports or Re/code.
“Today, the company is introducing an iPad-based checkout system that it expects tens of thousands of businesses that run a Groupon promotion to use,” Del Ray reports. “The system includes, among other things, software that lets businesses track cash and credit and debit card transactions, an iPad to replace a cash register and a tool that will allow a shop’s customers to redeem a Groupon voucher by simply telling a cashier their name at checkout. Customers who have downloaded Groupon’s app and have Bluetooth turned on on their phone will have their discount recognized automatically upon entering a specific store.”
Del Ray reports, “The new product, dubbed Gnome (pronounced GEE-nome), also includes payment processing (1.8 percent plus 15 cents a transaction for MasterCard and Visa purchases), integration with popular small business accounting software programs and the ability for businesses to build and automatically update a database with names and contact information for their customers.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
Click to the source article. It shows a table mounted iPad in a stand with a credit card reader. Interesting. Consider a store handling the longer holiday lines with an employee using a checkout station on wheels. They service the line removing anyone that wants to use their card and exit the lines. I see several ways this can be used where location, wired networking and power is an issue.
This is a good thing.
A week ago while traveling on business made a late night pit-stop to a craft distillery outside Philadelphia.
My first experience with a merchant carrying an iPad around with a Square credit card reader attached.
Scanned my credit card and I signed with my finger on the iPad and e-mailed receipt.
Really cool tech. Bring it on …
Restaurants that want my business should have these. I will not let a member of the wait staff take my credit card out of my sight.
With the coming of chip and PIN credit cards, this won’t be an issue. Credit theft will be largely impossible with these new cards, beginning rollout in 2015.
No offense, but “largely impossible” is hard to pin on something based on technology.
I’m pleased to say that, despite the outrageous hype, chip and PIN cards are NOT going to be a mass movement in the USA.
It’s, let’s be blatant here, SHIT technology.
And if you had bothered AT ALL, Sam E. Lawrence, to study the cause of the RECORD BREAKING Target et al. customer account hacking robberies, you’d know this very simple fact:
Chip and PIN cards would have change N O T H I N G .
I’m not going to bother to tell you why, LAZY.
I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear enough in my final statement:
F*KING LAZY.
TechTardiness is rampant. I bet this ass works for Target.
I actually don’t, but are you saying it wouldn’t have changed anything because of the way the Target hackers used a RAM dump of unencrypted data to steal the card numbers? My understanding is that with C&P, the card processing is handled via token authentication rather than direct track data scanning, and so the decryption is done server-side rather than at the swipe location. Am I wrong?
(C&P = Chip and PIN). I plead ignorance about C&P scanning and what data is fed in from the chip. It can be done many different ways. The wrong way is to have your account data on the chip, handed off to the scanner, decrypted (if it ever was encrypted!) into RAM and darn, it gets stolen EXACTLY the same way as striped cards.
I like what I believe you’re expressing whereby the account data is never ‘in the clear’ in the reader’s RAM. That’s excellent. It bypasses the malware that grabs RAM data, which is what’s the problem with the Windows XP Embedded POS readers.
Then, once the account reference is on the server, you have to worry about server security. But that method would totally kill off worrying about the POS devices.
The only nagging thing for me is how the POS device authenticates the ‘account data’. The PIN is the password. I’d like to see huge long PINs, not the 4 and 5 digit jokes currently used. I suspect there are further details about authentication at that point I need to understand. I’ll have to dive into that subject.
Yeah, I don’t fully understand the newer systems either. At my last company, we dealt with payments, and had to have PADSS and PCI compliance for card swipes which we handled decryption on, and I remember one of the developers saying that with C&P, this responsibility would be entirely offloaded onto Verifone at both the hardware and service level. My understanding is the a C&P card actually contains a SOC which is powered at time of insertion, performs an actual data process of some type, and then communicates to a remote server for an authentication token before the transaction can proceed… which means card “swipes” are about to take longer than they currently do, because the card has to remain inserted until the token returns to the merchant. One of the fears that our customers expressed (very high volume retail) was that this would slow down transactions and lead to much larger queues.
I have no idea how any of these new technologies interact with NFC payments.
That’s smart. I know of one Chinese restaurant where the owner stored dozens of credit card numbers, skipped the country and charged up over $100,000 illegally. My parents were one of the victims and the scandal attracted headlines and local authorities.
iPad demand is dead
He’s being sarcastic folks. Obviously.
This new wave is already hitting the shore. I see iPad ‘registers’ all over the place.
The real question: When are businesses going to get rid of those hacked Windows XP Embedded POS POS terminals, already? Cheap, lazy, stupid companies. Hello Target.