Between CES and Google’s press event, next week is bound to be a torrential mess of press releases. Looking to sneak onto the radar before every tech writer in the lands is pulled into cranking out post after post on the latest and great from the industry’s big guns, iPhone accessory maker Mophie has gone ahead and put their upcoming wares on the table.
Known primarily for their battery packs and cases, Mophie is about to jump into a whole new ball pit: credit card readers for the iPhone.
Considering that Mophie has thus far stuck solely to the hardware end of the iPhone add-on game, this seems like an odd market for them to dive into. So much so, in fact, that I initially thought they were just releasing the credit card reader (pictured above) as an alternative to typing your credit card into various applications by hand or, perhaps, as a more aesthetically pleasing piece of hardware for Jack Dorsey’s Square.
With a bit more reading, however, it looks Mophie might be prepping to square off (had to do it) against Dorsey’s service with a software solution of their own. Here’s what Mophie said on the matter:
Marking its first combination hardware and private label iPhone application device, mophie is launching its innovative new credit card reader, empowering users to complete financial transactions on the go.
The wording of that was just vague enough that it left things a bit unclear; they are indeed bringing their own software – but what was it for? Under that definition, this could still be little more than an easier (if a bit silly) way for consumers to input credit card numbers whilst ordering online. We prodded for more info – here’s the response:
The credit card reader works with an iPhone application and is meant for small business owners to conduct transactions easier.
So there we have it folks – Mophie’s getting into the transaction business. Whether or not they’ll be handling the payment processing themselves (as Square is) or simply acting as a middle-man for a service like Paypal or Authorize.net is still unclear. Look for more details to emerge during CES next week.