POS Industry Blog

Head of PayPal unit steps down to join Facebook

David Marcus, who has led eBay's fast-growing payments unit PayPal for the past two years, will step down this month to run Facebook's messaging products, the companies announced on Monday.

EBay shares fell a little more than 2 percent in trading after hours. Under Marcus, PayPal has moved more aggressively into the physical world by developing a mobile wallet for consumers as well as point-of-sale systems for retailers.

Love with Food Raises over $1 Million for their Subscription Snack Box Service

Remember when every new startup was about shipping you things in a box once a month for a small monthly fee? Well, some of them are still around — like Love With Food, which is focused on sending boxes of healthy snacks to subscribers once a month and just raised $1.4 million in funding.

The new funding for Love With Food brings the total amount raised to just over $2 million and comes from a group of investors that includes Kapor Capital, 500 Startups, TEEC Angel Fund, Angel List Syndicate led by Yun-Fang Juan, Ironfire Capital, Scrum Ventures, Tom Peterson of El Dorado Ventures, and Talmadge O’Neill of Juvo Capital.

Drop Promotes Cooking as a Joyful Experience with their Scale Connected iPad Application

Though being connected to a food scale sounds interesting, the power will need to be in the software to engage users.

Drop, the creators of a new interactive recipe platform that works with an app and iPad-connected kitchen scale to improve the skills of home bakers, today launched its pre-order campaign at getdrop.co. Drop also announced that Stephane Stocki, product development manager, La Boulange, has joined Drop's advisory board to help guide the Drop team in sourcing and testing the highest quality recipes.

Square Picks Up The Ability To Send Invoices

Want to take credit cards from your taco truck? Use the portable Square Reader. Want to sell stuff through a little pop-up online front-end? Use Square Market.

But what if you want to invoice someone for a service (like, say, wedding photography) after the fact? Before today, Square couldn't really help you there. But now it can!

This morning, Square is launching a new invoicing system that it calls — you guessed it — Square Invoices

Payments Firm Swipely Raises $20M More As Its Processing Tally Crosses The $2B Mark

Payments company Swipely has announced that it raised a Series C round totaling $20 million. This round, led by the Pritzker Group and including previous investors Shasta Ventures and First Round Capital, brings the company’s tally to more than $40 million. Swipely had recently announced that its payment processing rate had doubled to $2 billion on an annual basis, but declined to tell TechCrunch at the time if it was pursuing more capital. As it turns out, and as this publication presumed, it was in the process of nailing down the Series C. The company’s revenue tracks up with its payment-processing rate, so to see it double that figure from $1 billion to $2 billion in under a year implies quick top-line growth.

Square Begins Offering of Cash Advances to Small Businesses

Today, payment processing company Square is announcing its first big additional vertical based on its enormous amount of business data. That offering is called Square Capital, and it enables the company to offer cash advances to businesses in its network. Square Capital has been piloted for several months, in which Square says it has issued ‘tens of millions’ in cash advances to ‘thousands of merchants’. The program is interesting in several aspects, all deriving from the fact that this will be (for now) exclusively for merchants ‘running their business on Square’. This is a proactive service that Square will be offering, reaching out to businesses it feels could utilize a chunk of cash to expand or energize their product in some way — and are capable of paying it back.

Revel Adds A Drive-Through Option To Its iPad-Based Retail And Restaurant Sales Systems

California-based iPad point-of-sale maker Revel Systems has added a drive-through option to its lineup of software and hardware accessories, making it possible for business owners to get set up with a way to cater to their drive-up customers without the use of a central server and complicated dedicated systems. The package is available for a flat fee for the necessary hardware, and gets a restaurant ready to roll without any additional monthly costs. The Revel drive-through setup includes two-way video chat between a server inside and the customer via a drive-up video display outside. This can work with an iPad embedded in a drive-through sigh, or by a larger connected display like a television if that’s already in place or more in line with a restaurant’s needs. The iPad can show the customer their order as they place it to make sure everything’s right, and there’s also going to be an option to allow them to pay for their order right on the display before pulling ahead to pick up their food.

Internet of Things, Big Data fuels latest batch of POS tech

The enterprise garners a majority of the attention when it comes to Big Data and the Internet of Things, but there's mounting evidence from this year's National Restaurant Association (NRA) tradeshow that the restaurant industry is carving out its own use cases to capitalize on the potential of a data-driven, connected future. Among the scores of technology vendors strutting their point-of-sale wares is a common theme of connectivity — from back office operations to targeted deals via data collection and analysis. Much like retail, the restaurant industry relies on a balance of internal functionality and customer relationship management to ensure its success.

eBay Security Breach

POS SECURITY | Information security and customer data protection are of paramount importance to eBay Inc., and admits in March a cyberattack compromised a database containing encrypted passwords and other non-financial data.

BREAKING POS NEWS | Ottawa-based Shopify Inc.

BREAKING POS NEWS | Ottawa-based Shopify Inc. announced today it's bringing its point-of-sales hardware & service to Canada after a successful launch in the U.S. while also making a bricks & mortar-only Shopify service available. With 100,000 merchants today Shopify is building upon its August 2013 expansion by launching a payments processing service & POS system that allows merchants to ditch third-party payment providers & use the same inventory management system for both e-commerce sales & in-store sales. Learn more about these market moving developments & the rapidly changing POS landscape.