Square’s not just for businesses apparently, as an invite-only page for a product called “Square Cash” has popped up. Not many details are known about it, but we’ve reached out to the company for comment.

UPDATE: A Square representative sent us the following statement on Square Cash: “We’re excited to share Square Cash with our friends. We’ll continue to invite others to try it out in the coming weeks.”

The splashy animated page shows an email to a friend with a $25 payment, with a Square email address in the CC line:

There’s only the promise of email sending at this point, but you can imagine that this could become a permanent part of Square’s native apps at some point.

This approach is similar to other personal payment solutions, like Venmo and PayPal. Google wants you to send payments to people via Gmail and Wallet. Even Visa got into the act at one point. You can view the page right now, and that’s it. Sending money to friends is a social experience that really hasn’t been cracked yet, and it makes complete sense that a service like Square step up to take the crown. The space is officially hot again.

The page promises that you can send money directly to someone’s debit card, even if they’re not signed up for Square. They’ll be given a link to attach a debit card with their first received payment, which serves as a fantastic way to onboard new Square users:

The invites are being controlled by the company, not even allowing you to enter your email address. There’s also a help page set up for the “Cash” product already, sharing that it will cost the sender $0.50 per transaction and will be free for recipients. You’ll both get receipts for each transaction. The company says on the page: “Square Cash is the easiest way to send money to anyone, using just email and your debit card.”

The company just announced a new, pretty iPad cash register for businesses, but Square clearly wants to be in all of our pockets…and bank accounts.

While it’s hard to decrypt CEO Jack Dorsey’s tweets and vines, Square Cash might have been the reason for this recent little celebration:

Celebrating an excellent little something. vine.co/v/b9JqebYq1wj

—
Jack Dorsey (@jack) May 20, 2013

We’ll let you know when we get our invites, but it seems like those close to Square and Twitter are getting first crack:

Just tried Square Cash. This is cool shit. square.com/cash

—
Wayne Chang (@Wayne) May 20, 2013

PayPal today announced Cash for Registers to encourage merchants to switch to PayPal-powered point-of-sale solutions. The program is part of the payment giant’s bid to be the kingpin among local merchants looking for lower-cost ways of accepting credit card payments. The announcement comes on the same day that Square launched Stand to complement its Square register product on iPad tablets and Groupon expanded and rebranded its mobile point-of-sale solution as Breadcrumb.

In exchange for local retailers handing in their “dusty old cash registers” for PayPal’s services, the eBay-owned company is offering to waive credit, debit, check and PayPal-processing fees for the remainder of 2013 as well as free advertising for participating merchants in the process. As with the offerings launched today by PayPal’s two competitors, this offer is only valid in the U.S. for now.

David Marcus, the president of PayPal who has been the driver of the company’s push into mobile commerce, noted that the program begins in June when the company will reveal more details on the exact terms of the offer, such as whether there will be a cap on how much can be processed with no fee this year. Although PayPal Here is probably best known as one of the many services out there that uses a dongle attached to a smartphone to turn it into a card reader, the company is pushing deeper into the market by offering a bigger suite of services and devices to run them — much like Square and Groupon announced today.

In PayPal’s case, this includes a merchant app for iPad, an iPad stand, a cash drawer and printer. Part of the program will also involve PayPal promoting the sale of these products, which are made by a number of companies including Erply, Leaf, NCR, ShopKeep and others.

In fact, perhaps as a swipe at rivals like Square, Marcus plays up the fact that PayPal itself is not driving most of the hardware developments itself: “At PayPal we’ve spent a long time listening to small businesses and retailers of all sizes, and we came to the conclusion that no one company can cater to the needs of all industries,” he notes in a blog post. “That’s why we have handpicked select partners that are each best-in-class in their respective categories.”

Marcus notes that there will be more PayPal Here hardware partners announced soon.

On top of the free processing fees, PayPal is also offering another lure to merchants: free marketing to the company’s 55-million-plus U.S. customer base, noting which places local to them are PayPal- and Here-ready (presumably via the PayPal app). This is not unlike the Square Directory that Square has been offering to consumers as it pushes further into Foursquare territory as the platform for local search.

Square has announced the hiring of a new Business Lead, Francoise Brougher, and she comes straight from spending eight years at Google. For the past three years, Brougher held the title of SMB Global Sales and Operations for the online advertising unit at Google.

Although Square has grown its footprint considerably, in part because of its high-profile partnership with Starbucks, the company has yet to announce its plans to address the international market. Today, the service is only available in the U.S. and Canada, which has allowed a plethora of competitors to thrive overseas, especially in European markets where companies like iZettle,  SumUp,Payleven, mPowa and Intuit have already launched.

Here’s what Square co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey had to say about the hiring:

Francoise is a perfect fit for Square. Her accomplishments in growing and managing large, global teams, and her focus on building simple, scalable solutions that empower millions of people, will have a huge impact on our company and our customers.

According to Brougher’s LinkedIn page, she had a hand in advertising operations for all of Google’s online advertisers, policy, quality and ad approvals as well as working on fraud and risk. These are skills that are going to come in handy for Square’s payment processing team.

Brougher’s reason for leaving Google and joining Square is to spend time helping small businesses “find the tools they need to grow and be successful.” She went on to thank her former colleagues at Google for “what we’ve achieved together.” Broughner played a huge role in bringing in advertisers to the system very early on, which now counts for revenue that allows Google to build out all of its moonshot ideas. She’ll be helping Square with customer support and partnerships, in addition to growing out the company internationally.

Prior to Google, Brougher spent four years at Charles Schwab as Vice President of the Business Strategy group.

There is no single mobile payment company in Europe that has reached the scale and stature that Square has in the U.S., where the Jack Dorsey-led startup processed $1 billion in transactions in 2012. Payleven, one of the many mobile payment startups that want to take that crown on the other side of the pond, is today announcing two more steps in its strategy to convince businesses and consumers to sign on. Payleven, part of the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet stable, has been authorized as a payment institution by the UK’s Financial Services Authority; and it is also now part of MasterCard’s mPOS program – two moves to improve its credibility as a secure payment provider.

This makes Payleven one of the first companies of its kind to get FSA certification in the UK — but not the first. As one example, iZettle, a well-backed competitor, has FSA approval as a financial institution in Sweden because that is where it’s headquartered. In Europe, approval by one FSA typically extends that approval to the rest of the European countries in the EEA footprint. In the UK, another competitor, SumUp, also has FSA approval as an authorized payment institution.

“We are very proud to be a trusted and fully authorised financial institution in Europe. Payleven is the first mobile payment provider to receive [UK] FSA authorisation, so it’s a major milestone for the company,” said Alston Zecha, co-founder and COO of Payleven, in a statement.

The mPOS certification from MasterCard, meanwhile, puts Payleven on par with a number of other mobile payment providers who have already signed on to MasterCard’s authorization scheme, which lays out best practices for merchants and payment providers, not just in terms of unifying standards but keeping security. It’s another move to improve Payleven’s credibility as a secure payment provider, with MasterCard regularly publishing a list for merchants to see which payment services are able to process different types of transactions.

Payleven last year became the first of the mobile payment companies to unveil a chip-and-pin terminal to process card transactions in the UK.

These are required in the UK for payments on the Visa network, which in Europe now only accepts secure PIN entry as a way of authenticating users making mobile-phone based payments. Since debuting the chip-and-PIN reader last year, Payleven has been working hard to set itself apart from the Samwer “clone” stereotype.

“We are Payleven. We are more than a clone. We are not replicating but we are creating something differently,” Zecha told TechCrunch last year.

Indeed, not only has Square not yet opened for business here in Europe, but it has yet to roll out solutions that would work with chip-based payment cards, focusing first on the magnetic stripe that is more common in its core U.S. market, among other point of sale services. eBay-owned payment provider announced in February that it would be offering its Here mobile payment service in the UK, its first European market, later this year. It will also come armed with a separate device for entering PIN identification to work with a merchant app on a mobile device.

In general, what FSA authorization means is that payment providers have been evaluated and approved by the financial regulator, and that they are meeting a required degree of security and risk management. Certifications of this kind help persuade skeptical businesses that they can put their trust into mobile payment startups not to run off with their money or compromise their security at any point. Longer term, it will also mean that Payleven (and others that get FSA approval) will be able to launch more extensive services directly to their enterprise customers without needing to use third parties who have FSA approval for the task.

In the UK, the FSA has been under fire for its role (or lack of role) in various financial problems over the last several years — one of the most recent being an admission of its slow response to the Libor interest-rate fixing scandal. On the other hand, the FSA has also been making some moves to make it easier for startups like Payleven to get into the transactions game. Just this week, it announced proposals to make it easier for startups to establish themselves as banks — needing just €5 million ($6.4 million) in capital for FSA approval. In other words, approval from an FSA may be a mixed blessing, but an important one all the same.

Payleven has to date publicly disclosed some $15.2 million in funding, with backers including NEA, Holtzbrinck Ventures and Italian businessman/politician Silvio Berlusconi’s family fund.

After debuting its in-store mobile payments technology PayPal Here in the U.K. two weeks ago, the payments giant is announcing another set of news around the product: an iPad app. Not only is this the first iPad app for PayPal Here, but it’s actually the company’s first native app for the tablet ever.

Last year, PayPal launched Here, a triangular dongle that plugs into an iPhone or Android device to read the magnetic strip on the back of a card — similar to the square-shaped dongle produced by rival Square. PayPal says that an iPad app was a hugely requested feature from its “hundreds of thousands” of merchant users. In fact, many users were simply magnifying the iPhone app to fit the iPad. Today, the iPad app will compete with the likes of Square’s iPad register app, Square Register.

The app’s design is different from its iPhone cousin and has been optimized for the larger touch screen of the device. It allows for multiple employee logins within one account, which is a key feature for any larger merchants or chains. Once you log in, you are taken to the register, which allows you to enter the total into the keyboard and take a payment in a variety of ways, including swiping the credit card using PayPal Here, entering the number manually, scanning the card using Card.io’s acquired technology, accepting a check, or using cash.

Once the transaction is approved, you can email, text or print a receipt. Merchants can also see which customers have check-in via the PayPal app.

There are a number of other interesting technologies built-in, as well. The app has integrated eBay’s RedLaser technology to allow users to scan barcodes to purchase items (which is not included in Square Register yet). Users can also use the scanning feature to add inventory to the app to allow for an easier checkout process. Merchants can also manually add items to the menu so cashiers can simply pick an item from a list to add to a bill amount.

In terms of backend technology, the iPad app shows merchants sales history, a daily summary of sales, gross sales to date, taxes, tips, discounts. You can also wirelessly connect the app to a cash drawer and printer. While the app could replace a register, PayPal says that it also is integrating into existing POS solutions from NCR, Vend, Kounta, Erply, Leapset and Shopkeep.

For now, the register only works in the U.S. with the PayPal Here dongle, but eventually the app will be integrated with the company’s international offerings, as well.

In late February, PayPal Here debuted its new hardware to accommodate the chip-based cards in the U.K. and other parts of the world, competing with some of the local payments companies like iZettle. But PayPal says the response to the U.K. reader has been positive, and already the company has had 11,000 merchants express interest in using the technology. As mentioned above, the company says PayPal Here in the U.S. is being used by hundreds of thousands of merchants, and is growing at a fair pace in terms of usage (which is still less than Square).

That being said, Square and Square Register has had a leg up on this market in the U.S. because it has been out for longer, and in that time has updated its iPad app several times. But the market is huge, especially among small- to mid-sized chains and a little competition should be interesting and help push companies to innovate faster.

Despite a rocky start to the year with the sudden departure of COO Keith Rabois, Square is still making a huge push to sign on new businesses on the Square platform and deliver smart, easy service for the mobile payments platform.

The latest development in that push is a new program called “Square: Business in a Box”, which essentially acts as a package deal for small and large brick-and-mortar businesses. Business in a Box gives users everything they’d need to run their small business’s Point of Sale, including two Square Readers, an iPad stand, a cash drawer, and an optional receipt printer.

Everything but the Square Readers come from third-party vendors, but all of these items work wirelessly and seamlessly with Square Register.

The first package goes for $299, and doesn’t include the receipt printer. If, however, you’re looking to print out receipts, daily sales reports and summaries, the Receipt Printer package is going for $599.

The idea is that business owners can set up a point of sale quickly and easily. By adding these items to the deal (such as the iPad stand and the cash drawer), Square is closing the loop on its Register platform. Traditionally, Square vendors have had to figure out the iPad stand thing on their own and buy their own cash drawer — all you get from Square is a free reader.

Now, Square is making it simple for businesses large and small to set up the entire point of sale experience by making one payment for all the various pieces of equipment and unpacking all of it from a single box.

If you’re interested in getting set up with Square’s Business in a Box, head over here to sign up.

A double-dose of details today about the normally secretive e-commerce startups incubated by the Samwer bothers-backed Rocket Internet. Silvio Berlusconi was outed as one of the key investors in Square clone Payleven; and Zalando, inspired by Zappos in the U.S., is reporting 2012 net sales of €1.15 billion and reaching breakeven in its core markets of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The two items are significant because Rocket Internet — the German-based e-commerce incubator and investment vehicle from the Samwer brothers that has created a range of businesses effectively recreating ideas first developed elsewhere — is known for being somewhat oblique when it comes to giving out certain facts about its portfolio companies, whether it’s the size of funding rounds, how many users they have, or who is backing them.

TechCrunch understands that Berlusconi and his family invest in Payleven through their B Cinque vehicle — “cinque” meaning five in Italian, and referring to his five children. Furthermore, this was the identity behind last month’s news that Payleven had received an additional “high single digit million dollar” investment from a mystery backer, in addition to named backers New Enterprise Associates, Holtzbrinck Ventures, ru-Net and the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet. That news was first published in the German press yesterday.

But TechCrunch also understands that B Cinque may be investing already or plans to invest in further Rocket enterprises: its €40 million investment fund was first made public in December 2012, and our source described it as a “very potent investor.”

Berlusconi, in addition to having been prime minister of Italy three separate times, is also the controlling shareholder of Italian media giant Mediaset, as well as owner of the A.C. Milan football club. He has also been in court for tax evasion and in the press over alleged sex scandals.

Putting all that color aside, though, making an investment in Payleven could pave the way for the mobile payments company to make a move into Italy, and even strike deals for usage through one of Berlusconi’s other operations (for example, selling goods at A.C. Milan games). Italy is a mobile-crazy country, and like other economies in southern Europe, it has a high concentration of small merchants who are not enabled to accept credit cards — meaning there is a natural audience there. One of Rocket’s competitors, SumUp, already offers services in Italy as well as Spain.

You say Zappos, I say Zalando

Perhaps hoping to get Rocket’s name out in a more positive light, today Rocket also put out some numbers on how Zalando, its online shoe/fashion site with some 150,000 styles from 1,500 brands, is doing. Given that Rocket doesn’t generally release these kinds of numbers, it’s worth taking a look:

Its net sales of €1.15 billion, Zalando says, are just over double what the company made a year ago (€510 million). Zalando claims that this makes it the first company in Europe to reach €1 billion in net sales annually within four years of opening for business. It also puts Zalando into breakeven (earnings before interest and taxes) in its core markets of Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

That growth works out to a rate of 125% over the last couple of years across the 14 markets where it operates, as you can see in this chart:

“By launching shops in several new countries we have now established a broad footprint. This will be the basis for Zalando’s growth for the years to come,” Robert Gentz, Zalando MD and co-founder, said in a statement.

In addition to its three core markets, Zalando is also active in Netherlands, France, Italy, UK, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Denmark, Finland, Poland and Norway. As with Rocket’s most successful exits — most recently with its daily deals operation CityDeal going to Groupon — the operation continues to complement the work done by Zappos in the U.S., a fact that has not gone unnoticed by investors, who have pumped hundreds of millions into the operation.

Backers of Zalando include Yuri Milner’s DST Global, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, Quadrant Capital, and AB Kinnevik, which is the company’s largest shareholder, in October taking a further 10% stake in the company for €287 million. Zalando also has debt financing of €40.7 million with he Commerzbank and the Sparkasse Mittelthüringen.

Last year, mobile payments company Square signed a massive deal to power credit card processing and integrate Square Wallet with Starbucks. Today, the company is announcing integration with another coffee chain–Blue Bottle Coffee.

According to a release, customers will initially be able to pay with Square Wallet at Blue Bottle’s Oakland, Brooklyn, and San Francisco Mint Plaza locations, with the company rolling out Square to its remaining stores in the coming months.

Blue Bottle will use Square Register as its full point-of-sale system (Starbucks does not use Square Register) to accept cash and credit card payments, track inventory, and monitor daily reports. Customers will also be able to use Square Wallet to make purchases just by saying their names.

“We put a great deal of thought into every detail in each of our stores. We think about the right wood for our counters, the best beans, and how we can continue to serve our customers the perfect cup of coffee as we grow,” said James Freeman, founder of Blue Bottle, said in a release. “Square’s attention to detail and focus on the customer makes Square Register the right choice for our business.”

Currently, Blue Bottle has 11 San Francisco Bay Area and New York City locations, with further expansion plans. The coffee chain just raised $20 million from True Ventures and Index Ventures and a number of angels, including Kevin Systrom, Matt Mullenweg, and Dave Morin.

As we reported last fall, updates to the company’s iPad-powered register, Square Register, has brought more and more small chains to the payments platform.

Square Register was reconfigured to support merchants of all types. Some of the more high-powered features included the ability to customize permissions for employees on the register, access to sales reports, and the ability to wirelessly print receipts or open a cash drawer to make change. Analytics allow merchants to segment consumer payments data and transactions, and users can access data around number of payments, subtotals, tax, tips, refunds, account deposits, etc. We’re told that revenue from Square businesses with multiple accounts is up seven times in the last six months.

While Blue Bottle is certainly not at the same scale as Starbucks, small to mid size chains still represent a huge opportunity for Square. A number of small, regional chains are using Square Register and payments including, Pitango Gelato in DC and Baltimore (5 locations), Cafe Grumpy in NYC (4 locations) Amy’s Ice Cream (13 locations) and Cartel Coffee Lab in Phoenix and Tucson (5 locations).

As part of the Starbucks deal, 7,000 Starbucks stores in the U.S. accept Square Wallet, and Square readers are also sold at company-owned Starbucks stores. Square also began selling its readers at Verizon stores a few weeks ago, bringing its total number of retail locations where the payments dongle is sold to 30,000.

Competition and activity continues to heat up in the mobile payments market. UK-based mPowa — a mobile payments provider that, like Square and others, provides a dongle that merchants can attach to a mobile device to process card payments — has signed a white-label deal with Portugal Telecom for the carrier to resell mPowa’s services as the centerpiece of its own mobile payments solution. The exact financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but mPowa’s CEO Dan Wagner tells TechCrunch that the deal is for seven years, worth multiple millions of dollars as a minimum commitment, and potentially covers some 100 million people — the size of Portugal Telecom’s footprint across Europe, Latin America and Africa.

Wagner says that mPowa is preparing to announce additional customers later this year. He says that discussions with more carriers, as well as with banks, are in “late stages” after the company has been “inundated” with requests for partnerships.

Carrier partnerships is a natural and increasingly used channel for mobile payments companies to scale up their businesses. Square works with AT&T to resell its dongles, and in the UK iZettle works with EE.

mPowa had a slightly odd legal wrangle with Square last year when it was accused of lifting photographs from Square’s marketing materials. But in reality there are some fairly large differences between them.

Unlike Square, which has some 2.5 million customers and is mainly active in the U.S., mPowa has been setting its sights on trying to build up an international presence. The next deals to come from mPowa will be in Africa, Asia, South America and Europe. North American partnerships, he says, are likely to come after that. “I don’t know who will drop next but we’re talking to people in South America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. North America will be later this year, while others are in late-stage discussions.”

Like other mobile payment providers such as iZettle and Payleven that are targeting users outside the U.S., mPowa is working on the premise of chip-and-PIN solutions that do not use the magnetic stripe on the back of payment cards. This is required in many markets like Europe and is likely to be the worldwide standard, including the U.S., by 2015.

Wagner also adds that the PT deal is likely also to involve using mPowa’s e-commerce back-end services to integrate with the mobile point-of-sale solution.

Small businesses that do not have card-acceptance facilities have traditionally been a first target for dongle-based solutions — and they are in this PT deal as well — but mPowa is also aiming for its services to be used by any retailer or businesses that depends on point-of-sale transactions, regardless of size or existing infrastructure. The idea is to take any of those transactions away from cash registers.

“It will either be a case of customers browsing and scanning and then picking up goods at a collection point, or of sales assistants going around to where you are to complete transactions,” Wagner said.

The PT deal was a relatively quick turnaround, he said. “They came to us only in November,” he said. “I haven’t even been to Portugal.”

In its home market of Portugal, PT is already offering fiber-to-the-home solutions to some 1.6 million customers and was one of the early movers in LTE, which now covers 90% of the Portuguese population. Its plan is to extend those and other services across the whole of its footprint.

“mPowa will be integrated in Portugal Telecom Group’s innovative solutions and services with a ready to deploy, robust, resilient and secure infrastructure to allow us to roll out mobile point of sale solutions to our customers,” said Celso Martinho, CTO of the Sapo Portal, owned by Portugal Telecom, in a statement.

Long-time investor and Valley executive Keith Rabois is leaving his chief operating officer position at payment company Square, according to a surprise announcement by the company tonight. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar will be acting COO while it looks for a replacement.

Rabois joined Square in August 2010 and developed most non-product parts of the company, including marketing, communications, business development, distribution, human resources and risk management, according to his CrunchBase bio.

There’s more than one way to decipher the reason based on the statements from Rabois and founder Jack Dorsey, below:

Dorsey:

Today I accepted Keith’s resignation from Square. When he joined, we had fewer than 30 employees and under 1000 active merchants. Today, over 3 million individuals and businesses are able to accept credit cards with Square, processing over $10 billion annually. We couldn’t have done it without him and we wish him well in his next opportunity.

Rabois:

It is amazing what Square has accomplished since August of 2010. When I joined, there were 17 engineers all reporting flatly to Jack. The local coffee shop served as our interview room. Leading our amazing crew has been the most rewarding professional journey of my life. I am forever grateful to Jack, for his confidence in me and to each and every member of the team for allowing me to learn from them.

But every day matters. And it is better at this point for me to be doing something different every day.

As a result, I’ve decided to resign from Square. I am very excited about what lies ahead for the company. Square could not be better poised for greatness.

I will have more to share about my next opportunity soon.

They both mention a next opportunity, which suggests that part was planned out. Having Friar come in as an acting COO suggests that part was not — although Friar is widely respected, and her move into the position doesn’t necessarily mean his departure was a huge surprise internally.

An often outspoken figure in Silicon Valley, Rabois also serves on the boards of Yelp and Xoom, is an occasional angel investor, and was an early executive at PayPal, LinkedIn and Slide. He didn’t comment when I reached him tonight, except to say that he’ll share more soon. Square, meanwhile, is having an all-hands meeting tomorrow to discuss his departure, according to sources.

Payleven, the Rocket Internet-incubated mobile-payment service that uses a dongle attached to a mobile device to make and process card transactions — yes, like Square — is today announcing that it has picked up another round of funding, as well as a new investor. As has been the case with many past investments in Samwer-incubated startups, neither the exact funding figure, nor the investor, have been disclosed — except to note that the value is in the “high single-digit millions” of dollars, and that it is “largely” from the new backer.

Payleven would not comment on whether this is a strategic investment (eg, from a payments company) or a VC. But, in the process of announcing this news, it did confirm reports of its existing backers — specifically New Enterprise Associates, Holtzbrinck Ventures, ru-Net and the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet, which together invested “double-digit millions” in a round last year.

As a point of comparison, European competitors iZettle and SumUp have respectively raised $46.7 million and $20 million. Still nowhere near the $341 million scooped up by Square since 2009.

Payleven has not released usage numbers for its service, which is now live in Germany, Netherlands, Italy, United Kingdom, Poland and Brazil, but a spokesperson tells TechCrunch that it will be using the funding to build out its service in markets where it already operates, as well as continue its international push.

The funding comes at a time when competition heats up among services that use dongles on mobile devices to enable credit card payments. But with Square or PayPal’s here yet to make any large movements outside North America, the playing field remains wide open. Startups in addition to Payleven offering dongle-based payments include iZettle, mPowa and SumUp.

Like many of its competitors, Payleven takes a 2.75% commission on all transactions, with a minimum spend of €1. And like these others, Payleven is going after the same type of client — small businesses that, up to now, may not have been able to accept card payments before because of their size.

But Payleven also has a unique selling point. As of October 2012, it became the only one that has integrated a chip-and-pin reader into its offering. The chip-and-pin reader is one of the few ways that major credit card company Visa has said is acceptable for verifying a user’s identity.

This has been a snag for competitors like iZettle and mPowa. At one point last year, iZettle had to stop taking Visa payments through its service because Visa decided that its signature-based authentication was not secure enough.

(Unlike Square and other payment companies in the U.S. that read the magnetic stripe on the back of the card, in Europe the majority of cards have a chip embedded in them, with a user further authenticating their identity by entering a four-digit code, rather than a signature.)

iZettle and others have so far managed to get around this issue by sending buyers to a mobile website for SMS-based authentication, but this of course is less efficient than punching in a short code on a keypad. These other companies are undoubtedly going to arrive at a more frictionless solution — including maybe their own chip-and-pin readers. For now, Payleven is making it more convenient for people to use its service compared to its competitors, with its device linking up with the merchant’s smartphone or tablet via a Bluetooth connection to complete the transaction and sync it up to the merchant’s account.

Because it’s using a European-specific approach to mobile payments, and solving a Europe-specific problem, Payleven believes that this is enough to keep it from being labelled a mere clone. That’s an adjective often applied to Samwer ventures that replicate the features and business models of startups in the U.S. that have yet to hit Europe and other markets where Rocket has launched.

“We are Payleven. We are more than a clone. We are not replicating but we are creating something differently,” co-founder and COO Alston Zecha told me in October when the company first launched the PIN reader.

Full release below.

payleven starts the new year with high single digit USD million funding

Berlin/London 21th Jan, 2013 – At the end of 2012, payleven, Europe’s mobile payment pioneer, secured additional funding to continue its strong growth in Europe and South America. The high single digit USD million amount comes largely from a new investor who joins the existing group consisting of New Enterprise Associates, Holtzbrinck Ventures, ru-Net and Rocket Internet. The name of the investor remains undisclosed. The additional funding comes after an initial double digit investment last summer. payleven turns a smartphone or tablet into a card terminal, enabling small businesses and mobile service providers to accept card payments everywhere – without any fixed costs or a complicated signup process.

Co-Founder and CMO Konstantin Wolff: “We are thrilled to see our investor base grow, which reflects the excitement for the first Chip & PIN mobile point of sale (mPOS) in Continental Europe. We want to remain innovative, develop our product and accelerate the growth of our merchant base. The close partnership we have with our investors is key to achieve this.”

In Europe, Visa only allows mPOS payments with Chip & PIN authorization. With the introduction of its Chip & PIN solution, payleven is the first company in Continental Europe to fulfill the high security standards required for a fully functional mPOS acceptance device. payleven has been working closely with Visa to ensure the right standards for its mPOS solution.

payleven’s Chip & PIN solution works through a compact, secure device that links to a smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth. The PIN is entered on a keypad on the device. With Chip & PIN, transactions are as secure as with a traditional card terminal and therefore merchants are protected to the highest standards.

payleven is tailored to the needs of small and independent businesses with fair and transparent terms and conditions. Billing is solely transaction based – there is no minimum turnover or fixed fee. Transaction costs are as low as 2.75% of the transaction value. All card payments can be accepted starting from EUR 1.

payleven, Europe’s mobile payments pioneer, is a start-up with its headquarters in Berlin and London and was founded in March 2012. payleven is founded by a group of young entrepreneurs who want to do things differently from the way big businesses operate. Our team members come from the payments and financial services industry (including large corporations like American Express, MasterCard, Travelex and Visa as well as small payment startups) and also from the software and technology sectors. The company is under the leadership of Co- Founders Rafael Otero, Alston Zecha, Dr. Alexander Zumdieck as well as Konstantin Wolff and currently employs around 70 employees. payleven is already available in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Great Britain, Poland and Brazil. Further press material and information can be downloaded at http://www.payleven.com

For all of you developers out there, you know how difficult it is to manage all of the bugs that pop up in the code that you push on a daily basis. Sometimes, you just don’t know when things will go wrong in production, so you have to be nimble and at the ready to fix quickly. Managing that workflow can be as difficult as fixing the code itself.

Payment company Square has built an internal tool that it calls Squash to help route problematic code to the right person. The tool has now been open sourced and is available on GitHub. When a developer checks in their code on a project, and something goes wrong, the tool will reach them directly and alert them to go in and fix something. This cuts out a few steps that would slow down the process, such as forcing a project manager to figure out who submitted what code, and assigning the fix to them.

This is how Square describes just a part of the tool’s functionality:

Rather than emailing the entire company when there’s a bug, Squash only sends an email to the engineer at fault. When people receive an email from Squash, they pay attention to it, because it’s usually something they’re prepared to address. If the engineer sits on the email, eventually it escalates. You can configure how you’d like unaddressed bugs to escalate.

Additionally, Squash provides some visualizations that will help engineers see how many bugs have popped up and how to triangulate the root cause:

Check out the demo video below:

We had some problems with exception tracking at @Square. So @riscfuture built us (and you) something incredible: squash.io—
Jack Danger Canty (@jackdanger) January 15, 2013

It’s always nice to see companies share tools that help their workflow. We’ve seen quite a bit of transparency when it comes to that from big names, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google in the past few years. Needless to say, Square’s engineers must handle a ridiculous amount of reported bugs, considering how many device types that their app is on and how many mobile operating systems they run on.

This is the second time that we’ve gotten to see an internal tool from Square, the first being that nifty app that keeps all of its employees connected.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

With the Starbucks deal in place, there’s no doubt that Square will continue to eye partnerships with large brick-and-mortar stores and brands to power mobile payments and loyalty. But there’s a point to be made that the major opportunity may not be with the large brands like Starbucks but with the multitude of small to medium sized chains across the U.S. and beyond. These are regional stores that have two or more locations, but aren’t as big as the larger national chains. If Square were to capture marketshare for these regional stores, the company would be able to complete the entire tail of merchants, from the local taco truck to the small chain of wine stores to the Starbucks. Interestingly, we’re told that updates to the company’s iPad-powered register, Square Register, earlier this year has brought more and more small chains to the payments platform.

As we reported in March, Square Register was reconfigured to support merchants of all types. Some of the more high-powered features included the ability to customize permissions for employees on the register, access to sales reports, and the ability to wirelessly print receipts or open a cash drawer to make change. Analytics allow merchants to segment consumer payments data and transactions, and users can access data around number of payments, subtotals, tax, tips, refunds, account deposits, etc.

Noah Dan, the founder and CEO of a number of Italian ice cream stores called Pitango Gelato in the Washington D.C. area, says Square Register works “better than any other solution on the market.” He explains that the simplicity in which Square has combined both the register functions as well as the financial transactional data is “nothing short of a genius approach.”

Dan says that because he has multiple locations (five stores); he needed a simple way for all of his employees to access and use a single point of sale system. He said that Square’s register was much more simple to use than the other systems he looked at and he didn’t feel that he was sacrificing any features by going with Square. With multiple stores, he can access all of his sales data in a single interface, and the systems were easy to implement across his shops. He was able to onboard all five of his stores within a week. He adds that the price point (the 2.75 percent per swipe fee) was attractive, as well.

Jeremy Veatch, the founder of Cartel Coffee Lab, a local coffee house in Phoenix and Tucson with five locations, initially started using Square when he had one store. Veatch highlights the ease of onboarding when he did expand as one of the reasons why he stuck with Square instead of moving to a different point-of-sale system. Similar to Dan’s perspective, the simplicity of the register and the ability to export sales data into Excel files is a key function that he uses across his locations.

He explains that he likes the ability to see how each store is performing from a single app, and he doesn’t actually have to go into each store. He can also update menus on the fly, as well as add or remove items from certain locations from his iPad app.

Item management for chains is actually a very important feature. Many chains have slightly varied menus, or run out of items at different paces. If you have multiple locations running Square, with each of them listed in the Square directory, each can list different items on their menu. For now, when you search on Square’s online Directory for these stores, you’ll see each location listed separately.

Veatch and Dan aren’t the only smaller chains using Square. Cafe Grumpy in New York City now uses Square Register across its four locations. Amy’s Ice Cream in Austin has 13 locations using the point-of-sale offering. Three Twins in Napa has two locations running Square.

There are still features that Square could roll out to make things even more simple for these smaller- to medium-sized chains. For example, Veatch says that in order for him to access his five stores’ data, he has to log in separately in the Register app’s separate access points with five different passwords. The ability to access all the locations with one password/username would be ideal, he says.

While the Starbucks deal is no doubt a huge win for Square from a branding and exposure perspective, these smaller chains could represent a huge opportunity for Square to command a meaningful part of payments for the regional merchant. This is why we’re seeing PayPal develop custom payments integrations for mid-size, regional retailers, as well.

With credit cards, as with many of these point-of-sale offerings, the register of choice will come down to function and feature. Whoever is able to pick up the most of these retailers is going to be the payments company that provides the most easy to use, yet powerful, offering that is tailored to the needs of chains. It’s unclear yet who that will be, but it looks like Square is off to a good start.

A reminder today that big companies often have trouble mirroring the efforts of companies disrupting their spaces: Payment industry giant VeriFone is killing its Square competitor Sail, which just launched in May, thanks to costs that didn’t make the “razor-thin margins” it was seeing from its small merchant customers worthwhile. VeriFone announced the closure of its dongle-based mobile point-of-sale system during its Q4 earnings call yesterday.

Sail will continue to exist on life support, essentially. VeriFone will be offering third-party partner customer support, and will provide those third-parties with dongle hardware and payment gateway access, but will discontinue any efforts around acquiring customers for the service, risk management or customer billing in its U.S. business. The company will however look into offering a version for global markets that works with EMV (chip and pin) tech, VeriFone CEO Doug Bergeron said during the call.

Bergeron said that the only way companies will thrive in this space, so far as he can see, will be in providing other services on top of the basic payment processing that will raise margins and the average revenue brought in per merchant. The cost of acquiring customers, vs. what they actually pay out doesn’t work, he suggested, especially given that use of the services by the kinds of very small independent merchants the systems are designed for tend to be occasional, infrequent and hard to predict.

Square seems to be aware of this, too, and recently started expanding its options, with the introduction of Square Wallet and a partnership with Starbucks that allows its dongle to be used to accept payments at Starbucks locations across the U.S. Working with retailers to expand its POS presence appears to be a new element of Square’s strategy, and one it confirmed to me in August it will be pursuing aggressively.

The demise of Sail is maybe an admission that big incumbents can’t match Square’s progress in the market it spearheaded with its own mobile payment dongle, but the more important fight in terms of long-term sustainability looks like it could still be fought among higher-tier businesses and retailers – and as our own Leena Rao pointed out in November, that’s where VeriFone is strong and looking to get stronger.

This weekend, we told you about the launch of Square Wallet gift cards, which allow you to send gift cards to friends to their favorite places to eat and visit in their neighborhoods. The power of this is that you don’t have to visit the physical store to buy an actual gift card, which is a time suck any way you slice it.

Additionally, it lets you send more gift cards no matter what time of year it is. If someone made you smile, why not send them a $10 gift card to Starbucks? That’s exactly what Square is placing its bets on you doing. Businesses are obviously happy about it, because it spreads their footprint when they might not have the marketing dollars or know-how to do so.

Whether you agree with or like what Square is doing, no other company has launched a gift-card program at this scale before.

We spoke with Square COO Keith Rabois today about the launch, what it means for consumers and businesses, as well as how Square can continue to grow to make a better payment experience for everyone involved.

———

TechCrunch: What do gift cards mean for the future of Square?

Keith Rabois: Obviously we’re extremely excited about gift cards. A product like this has never been seen before – you can buy things from your couch that are custom and thoughtful.

TechCrunch: At the end of the day, what does Square want to do for consumers?

Keith Rabois: We’re giving them a vast array of experiences with gift cards, and saying “just from your phone or sofa you can treat a friend somewhere, with one click.” When I buy someone a gift who is close to me, I’ll go out of my way to go shop for them, although often I’m fairly lazy and procrastinate, so maybe I get them a generic gift card or something lame. With Square, now I can send everyone I care about a gift card, not just for holidays or events, and it’s meaningful.

I’ve been able to send colleagues gift cards for doing great work. If I had to physically go to their favorite stores in person, would I really have done that? My parents are in New Jersey. Would I be able to go there? I don’t go to New Jersey anymore. Square Wallet eradicates that problem. It’s actually fun.

TechCrunch: How are businesses growing and benefitting from what you’re doing, including gift cards?

Keith Rabois: What Square Wallet Gifts does is take their best customers and amplify their voice. I don’t have an easy way of encouraging my friends to go to places. They tweet and Facebook about it and I see it. I can incent my friend to visit their favorite places. Every business is now giving a megaphone to their best customers, and we can help share that experience and magic with our friends and family by “picking up the tab.”

TechCrunch: Does disruption bring backlash?

Keith Rabois: What we think we’re doing is empowering…revolution, not disruption. We’re not trying to rearrange the world, just improve it. Any time you launch new products and services, it takes consumers time to adopt it. In 1997 not everyone was comfortable with buying things online. Two years ago Square seemed a bit far out there. Right now 40 million, nearly 50 million Americans have bought something through Square. You realize how different it is and you get more comfortable with it. Almost everyone in the U.S. knows someone who bought something with Square. Eventually, everyone will know someone who has.

TechCrunch: How does Square use social signals to improve the product and experience?

Keith Rabois: We have a lot of data ourselves about where people like to shop, and use of those signals to prioritize and recommend where people like to go is something we already do. We process millions of transactions a week and we study that data and infer what we should suggest. You will see us recommend gifts to people in many ways and show you where you will like based on transactional data.

TechCrunch: How did the launch of gift cards go?

Keith Rabois: It was incredibly successful. Reaction on Twitter alone shows the popularity.

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Not only does Square have a lot of data, it is using it wisely. By using information about where people like to go, and how often they go there, the company can create a better, more profitable product for itself, as well as businesses and merchants.

The idea of Square being revolutionary rather than disruptive was interesting to me, as well. Maybe not everything has to be “broken” to be fixed. Following what Square is up to is interesting, and it’s one of the products that I hear most about from those who aren’t super geeks. That is a signal that the company is on to something massive.

The process of getting someone a gift card is kind of ridiculous. You go to a store, you take out your credit card, pay for it and then hand it to a friend. That’s the gist of it, and it’s a slow process.

Today, payment service Square has introduced a new way to send gift cards. With the Square Wallet (or is it lowercase W now?) app you can now go through all of the businesses that use Square to process payments, pick the right one for your friend or family member, and then purchase them a gift card in the amount of your choosing. Right now, this just works for folks in the United States.

Best part is you don’t have to go to that physical store and take out your credit card.

It just works.

Here’s a video about the Gift Cards product, which looks, feels and sounds very much like an Apple commercial:

The process couldn’t be simpler from within the app:

A week of cappuccinos for my dad. http://t.co/RSaYZCoJ

—
Jack Dorsey (@jack) December 09, 2012

Also, when someone buys you a gift card and you have Square Wallet installed, it’ll pop up in your Passbook in iOS 6. Clearly, Square works very closely with Apple, and this has to be the best implementation of Passbook that I’ve heard of to date.

As you know, the company recently raised a $25 million mega-round of funding, led by their new partners at Starbucks. Square is now being integrated into all of the Starbucks stores in the United States. Gift cards from Starbucks are a hot gift, so think about how much money could potentially flow through Square’s payment infrastructure this holiday season.

Crazy, right?

If Square gets what it wants in the world, we’ll never have to carry cash or a physical credit card again. I feel like this is a company that will go public soon or will be acquired by Apple. It’s disrupting too big of a vertical not to go onto huge things. At last check, the company is processing $10 billion in payments annually, not including the Starbucks partnership. Wow.

Let’s not forget, Facebook is also diving into Gifts, so this should be interesting to watch. Is Twitter next? I hear they’re friends with that Dorsey guy who started Square.

We recently witnessed an awesome integration of Square at an ice rink in San Francisco:

When you think about using Square, it’s very easy to drift off into thoughts of paying for coffee, food, or goods at a farmer’s market. In reality, the point-of-sale system that Square has created is a powerful thing for any business, small or large.

Yesterday, TechCrunch spent some time at Safeway Ice Rink in Union Square, right in the heart of San Francisco. I’ve learned that the company is seriously infatuated with squares (even its new office will be in the shape of one), so it makes total sense that they approached the Union Square rink for the promotion.

So far, so good. Have a look:

After launching its mobile payments service in Canada a few weeks ago, Square is expanding its presence in the country with new retail partnerships.

The company’s mobile card reader is now available in more than 250 retail stores in Canada, including Apple, Best Buy, and Futureshop locations. The Square Card Reader suggested retail is $9.95 with a $10 rebate issued by Square.

In June, Square announced that it had doubled its presence in U.S. retail stores since the beginning of the year by landing in about 20,000 outlets nationwide. Square’s readers are sold at AT&T,Walgreens, Staples, FedEx Office, Apple, Wal-mart, Best Buy, RadioShack, and Target.

A spokesperson for Square issued this statement on the news: Neighborhood retail locations are an important resource for small business owners to discover new opportunities and technologies that can help them grow. We’re hoping to bring the same retail success to Canada that we’ve seen in the U.S.

Square just hit $10 billion in annualized payments and is used by more than 2 million businesses. It should be interesting to see how businesses in Canada contribute to Square’s usage in the coming months.

Flint, a small business-focused mobile payment app that does away with dongles and NFC and instead uses the camera on a phone to “scan” a card’s numbers, has come out of beta. The iOS 6/ iPhone 5-compatible app is now available to download in the U.S. App Store.

In development for the last 18 months, Flint first launched as an invite-only service in May 2012, at the same time that it announced $3 million in funding from True Ventures and Storm Ventures.

Like Square, PayPal’s here, Sail from Verifone and others, Flint is targeting merchants that, traditionally, have been considered too small to accept card payments, because they do not have a high enough volume of transactions to justify the processing fees and card-reading equipment. Flint says that there are some 17 million businesses in the U.S. alone that fit this profile.

Unlike Square, here and Sail, Flint doesn’t rely on any hardware to do the job, other than what is on the mobile phone itself. That means that future-looking solutions like NFC — the basis for payment solutions from the likes of Isis — are also not necessary for Flint to work today. After a card’s vital numbers are scanned and digitized — the numbers are sent to Flint without being stored on the device — the payment is then authenticated with a zip code and on-screen signature.

In its beta phase, Flint says that it’s already been picking up some decent momentum. It’s had about one thousand merchants from all 50 states sign up to use the service, including photographers, therapists, consultants, fitness trainers, IT professionals and tradespeople. Flint is not yet releasing total merchant numbers or transaction volumes on the app. But Greg Goldfarb, co-founder and CEO of Flint Mobile, says that average transaction size was higher than expected, at “well over $100.”

“We feel this reflects the user base being professional service types, consultants, etc. instead of the typical retail merchant (coffee shops, etc.) that Square is in,” he added.

“Flint’s mission is to empower everyday small business users who are out and about and who are underserved by other solutions,” said Goldfarb in a statement. “We’ve worked very closely with our beta users to develop a compelling app and are excited to make it available to a broader audience.”

Apart from not requiring a dongle to work, Flint is hoping to compete against more established mobile payment startups by offering some other advantages. For starters, its commission structure charges 1.95% plus $0.20. Credit card users pay 2.95% plus $0.20. By comparison, Square charges 2.75 percent per swipe. (Manually-entered cards cost 3.5 percent plus $0.15 with Square.) Merchants can activate the service through the app itself, rather than needing to register online.

It’s also offering some services around the transactions themselves. These include social marketing — customers can share business reviews and recommendations on Facebook after making a payment; those can also get posted to a business’ Facebook page. Flint also lets businesses customize receipts, create loyalty offers, program a range of pricing options/menus and include sales tax and tipping. And finally, Flint also offers a kind of online “dashboard” of sorts, where merchants can get an overview of all transaction activity, although there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of analytics around those transactions yet.

For now, the app is iOS-only, but like its competitors, it’s likely that Flint will be rolling out for other platforms soon, and potentially could even work on non-smart devices, given that most feature phones are also equipped with cameras. Goldfarb says that Android is next up with an app coming out in early 2013.

And given that the solution is software-based, you could also see a time when Flint might also consider how it can create an API to embed its service directly into business’ own apps. Indeed, this is something that Flint is already considering. “We are indeed in discussions with a number of potential integration partners,” says Goldfarb. “From an overarching point of view we built the platform with potential to embed or white label the solution for partners.”

Square just announced that it is seeing $10 billion in annual payments through its mobile payments platform. That’s up from the most recent stat from a few weeks ago of $8 billion processed annually.

Why the sudden surge in growth? Well, Square has been actively advertising on TV and adoption has probably grown via this marketing angle. And interestingly, we’re told that the new $10 billion number does not include payments processed via Starbucks.

The company announced a recent deal with Starbucks, which took effect this past week. As part of the agreement, 7,000 Starbucks stores in the U.S. will be able to accept Square Wallet. Starbucks is integrating the company’s Pay With Square app service into its own app, meaning that users will be able to charge their Starbucks orders via Square. The company also began processing all U.S. credit and debit card transactions at participating Starbucks stores, which is going to be huge.

Two weeks ago, Square went live with its payments service in Canada, marking its first international expansion. Currently 2 million businesses are using Square. And Square just raised $200 million, reportedly valuing the company at $3.25 billion.

Considering the massive amount of money that flows through Starbucks on a daily basis, Square is going to see another considerable jump very soon as it starts processing all credit card payments. Stay tuned.

UPDATING