payment

Well, we finally have a glimpse at "Square," the new mobile payments venture coming from Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey. As expected, it's a little hardware add-on that can turn an iPhone into a credit card reader.

The funny part: Details about the small-business-oriented project have been on the Web for months. It was just that nobody had put two and two together until some eagle-eyed folks at Engadget realized that a URL on a screenshot of the "Square iPhone Payments Venture" first reported by Coolhunting matched a domain registered to Dorsey.

Dorsey, who … Read more

Excel Invoice Manager Platinum provides a comprehensive invoice creator and tracker. The program's familiar layout makes it a snap to manage.

We felt instantly comfortable with this program's interface, since it was built using Microsoft Excel. Its rows and columns don't look like a spreadsheet, yet they are filled and manipulated the same way. Invoice Manager provides ample space to create customer profiles and enter this information into your invoices. Also, you can customize the look of your invoices by inserting your company logo, which gives them a professional touch. In addition, you can easily populate your … Read more

Express Invoice is a tool for creating invoices and managing bills for small businesses. Its simple layout and helpful options make it a great program for keeping an eye on finances.

We found the program to be instantly inviting, with its functions clearly labeled and helpful onscreen instructions popping up along the way to express what data needed to be placed where. We were able to quickly populate a customer database with all billing information, build our warehouse of sale items from scratch, and apply both of these aspects toward creating an invoice. We were pleased with the professional and … Read more

Amazon Payments today launched a new service that brings the company's payment processing tools to mobile devices. Amazon Mobile Payments Service (MPS) includes a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow mobile developers and merchants to provide payment options to their customers within mobile Web sites and applications--including the convenience of Amazon's 1-Click checkout system.

There are already a number of mobile payment providers, but Amazon is the big dog of the e-commerce world with an enormous amount of customer accounts already in use. This could be an excellent option for companies that offer mass-market mobile applications and are looking for ways to easily accept payments.

The service will automatically detect the request origin, meaning a Web or mobile browser, or a mobile application so that developers don't need to re-work their applications. … Read more

The personal information you give to businesses may not be as secure as you hope, according to a new survey.

Around 55 percent of all businesses acknowledge that they secure credit card information but not Social Security numbers, bank account details, and other personal data, according to a survey of more than 500 companies released Wednesday by Imperva and Ponemon Institute.

The survey was conducted to determine how many companies are complying with PCI DSS, the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard. PCI DSS tries to ensure that businesses take specific measures to secure their Web sites, databases, and … Read more

Home Loan Interest Manager Pro provides a tool for monitoring every aspect of mortgages. While the program can get overwhelming, it ultimately helps users understand home loans.

With the program's many command options, we smartly headed to the topic-oriented Help file. This, along with the program's wizard, showed us how to navigate our loan within minutes. We needed to have a lot of information present to fill out the wizard (Interest rates, loan amounts, duration of the loan, etc.), but it was worth the hassle since it laid the foundation of our mortgage. Some other options were much … Read more

Credit Card Manager 2009 offers users a chance to keep all their credit card information in one place. While the program offers an extremely usable format, some may simply choose to manage a credit card via its Web site.

We made an immediate trip to the program's Help file because the interface was a blank slate with no direction for users. Reading the brief descriptions of the process, we quickly gained footing and a better understanding of the program as a whole. We filled out the vital information for all of our credit cards to find a simple listing … Read more

Excel Invoice Manager Express provides users with a fast, familiar way to write up invoices. By using an Excel format, users should feel instantly at home with this program.

The invoice program's interface is highly intuitive because it has been built within a spreadsheet. With a few choice command buttons, users familiar with Excel will know exactly where to input data and what to expect. However, an in-depth Help file is also available. The program's layout basically walks users through the process of creating an invoice. Well-labeled areas for customer addresses, their own company's address, and invoice … Read more

PayPal, eBay's well established but aging mechanism for online payments, is trying to rebuild itself for a new generation of online commerce possibilities.

At an event for press and developers on Thursday, PayPal and its partners described several new programming interfaces that are part of the company's upcoming Adaptive Payments Service and showed what developers can do with them.

For example, Microsoft will use the interface to enable payments within its forthcoming Azure cloud-computing service. And LiveOps' on-demand outsourcing service will use it to automatically handle fluctuating payment amounts and changes to who's being paid. Finally, the … Read more