PayPal's new "Here" system, that uses a new dongle to allow swiping of credit cards, and turns a smart phone into a point of sale terminal, uses software from card.io.
Just to confuse you, though, card.io also launched its own consumer app earlier in 2012, allowing merchants to accept purchases using a smart phone's own camera.
The deal with PayPal seems to allow merchants to accept credit cards without readers or extra hardware, even though most of the attention is being paid to the new dongle method.
“Merchants can immediately begin accepting credit cards with nothing but a phone," card.io says. For the moment, consumer and retailer payment experience probably suggests adoption will be easier using the dongle. People are used to swiping their credit cards.
But card.io expressly was designed to use only the camera and resident software on smart phone. One suspects the idea here is to support merchants with a dongle now, because it is culturally familiar, but allow for an easy migration to a "smart phone only" approach later.
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