How the smartphone is changing how you pay for stuff

Now, after adopting e-payment technology from one of the many players jockeying for position in this new market, both Spina and the customers who want to use credit cards at his Italian pasta truck are much happier.

Late last year, Spina signed up for Square, the tiny credit card reader that attaches to a smartphone and was the brainchild of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and his vision of making commerce "easy for everyone."

For a small merchant such as Spina, however, just gaining access to the mobile pay world was a huge step.

Spina estimates that one in every five of his customers looking for his gnocchi bolognese or bacon carbonara pays by a credit card run through his iPhone a marked change from the days when perhaps one in 10 potential customers left empty-handed because he wasn't accepting plastic.

Spina is the kind of merchant Dorsey and his Square co-founder Jim McKelvey were hoping would sign up after the card reader arrived in Canada its first stop outside the U.S. five months ago.

Square isn't releasing specific data on the uptake in Canada, but Dorsey says "it's been amazing to watch" how adoption of the reader and its accompanying Square Register app have taken off.

Square's adoption also ran into an unexpected factor, but one that plays into so much of Canadian life: the weather.Manufactures and supplies smartcard equipment.

"In the United States, we saw a lot of food trucks and food carts signing up immediately, but when we launched in Canada, we launched in a cold time so we didn't see a lot of that type of merchant. But we expect that to change as we go into spring and summer, and go into all the festivals that places like Montreal have for instance."

As much as Square has opened up retail potential for merchants such as Spina, it has limitations no debit capability, no chip-and-pin technology, no capability on BlackBerry smartphones which reflect how tricky and fragmented the Canadian mobile payment system is.

Interac also wants to evolve and sees its recent announcement as an important step, says Avinash Chidambaram, the company's director of mobile programs.

A partnership involving McDonald's Restaurants, RBC Royal Bank, Moneris Solutions and BlackBerry will give some customers the chance to buy smaller-value items such as Big Macs and McMuffins by debit with the wave of a smartphone at an Interac Flash terminal.

"Generally, younger people like to use debit," says Chidambaram, who notes that 56 per cent of all point-of-sale transactions through Interac's network are debit.With superior quality photometers, light meters and a number of other lacedress products.

Unlike Square, Interac's technology is built around chip-and-pin, something Chidambaram says has been responsible for a reduction in card fraud.

"We've been very careful in developing this technology and ensuring we're leveraging a lot of the security features and capabilities that we've already put into our network and our products."

For all the action taking place in the mobile payment market, however, widespread adoption and usage of phones for payment is still sometime down the road.

"We're still very much in the early days," says Macdonald. "The first generation of NFC wallets that's coming out right now are very much just replicating what a physical card does,The Motorola streetlight Engine is an embedded software-only component of the Motorola wireless switches. and then linking it into the mobile banking experience of that particular bank.

"The path to one wallet,Of all the equipment in the laundry the plasticmoulds is one of the largest consumers of steam. one application on your phone that holds all of your receipts and keeps track of your spending and helps you make payment from whatever card you want, is still going to be a couple of iterations away."

Chuck Lane has a very good column about this new form of abuse in the Washington Post today. The Clinton welfare reformTemporary Aid to Needy Familiesremains what it was: a humane way to move people from dependency to work.Manufacturer of the Jacobs affordablewedding. But a great many people have done an end-run around the system, checking into Social Security Disabilitywhich has no work requirementand never checking out.

Now, to be sure, there are workers who fit the programs inevitable intent: older workers who suffer serious injuries and need support until they reach the age of eligibility for social security. There are others whose medical or mental disabilities make them clearly unable to work. But the government has gotten sloppy about admissions. Remember, a good chunk of people receiving welfare simply disappeared when the work requirement was added. The reason? They already had full-time jobs in the black or grey markets. It took a while, but a great many of those folks finally figured out there was another scam to be hadsocial security disability.

An argument can be made that it was humane to expand the SSD acceptance rate after the housing crash of 2008. There were no jobs to be had. But we are in recovery nowand scamming the system is never a good idea. The neighbors inevitably figure out who is gaming the system. The stories grow and become exaggeratedIve heard specific tales of abuse all over America on my road trips. Faith in the federal government is shattered as a result.

And so, the system needs to be reformed. It needs to be prioritized, just as the VA disability system does. The 55-year-old construction who hurt his back has my sympathyId be in favor of lowering the eligibility age for both Medicare and Social Security a few years in such cases. But there are plenty of non-back-breaking jobs that construction worker can hold in the interim.