Square's remarkably similar Chinese competitor appears

Mike Butcher

Mike Butcher is the European Editor for TechCrunch. A former grunge rock drummer, he became a long time journalist, and has since written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. Mike is also a co-founder and shareholder of TechHub, a co-working space/service/community with several locations... → Learn More

Thursday, June 9th, 2011


While Square is believed to be raising $50 million or more, say sources, at a valuation of $1 billion plus, and processing more than $3 million per day in mobile payments, others are noticing their traction. In China.

To that end iBOXpay is advertising its development of a “free mobile payment platform”, although it doesn’t appear to be on sale yet.

The makers say it offers (according to Google translate) an:

“Open, convenient payment experience. Your answers will help us to improve the application of the box to solve your problems. Here is the content of our questionnaire, about the time you spend 5 minutes, 5 minutes is not long, but is particularly valuable (the survey are non-anonymous survey, do not worry about personal information disclosure).”

So that’s alright then.

The rest of the site goes on to survey users about mobile payments.

The company appears to be in Shenzhen, China.