Smart Phone Transactions

New technologies are turning smart phones into credit cards and cash registers, but as usual, there are trust issues and people are nervous about abandoning their wallets all together. “‘The future has arrived,’ tweeted Mayer Hawthorne, a singer and songwriter who used Square to sell his CDs and merchandise while on the road,” writes the L.A. Times. “The plastic card reader plugs into the headphone jack on an iPhone or Android-based phone and interfaces with the phone’s software, then the transaction is processed through Square’s secure servers. Apps for the Palm Pre and BlackBerry are said to be in the pipeline.”