Core77

PayPal Here By Behar

By Rain Noe - March 23, 2012

in Object Culture

Geometry fans will be excited: A triangle is about to do battle with a square. Yves Behar has designed the new PayPal Here device, a triangular, swipe-accepting dongle that plugs into your iPhone. It's stiff competition for the Square, the incumbent credit-card-swiping phone plug-in that doesn't have PayPal's monstrous infrastructure behind it.

While the device looks a bit strange—that part on the front that moves, presumably to uncover the swipe channel, looks like it's going to fall off, no?—the demo of how it works seems pretty smooth:

As a merchant I probably would not want you to put your disgusting fingers all over my smartphone, but this does seem a much more elegant way to perform a transaction than having to sign a slip of paper. Bic and the companies that make receipt paper and receipt printers ought to start looking into alternate forms of revenue.PayPal and fuseproject have also put together a little video purporting to show the design process. While the video commits a pet peeve of mine—there's no explanatory narrative that could provide some insight—we do get to see the boatload of sketches Behar and co. went through to arrive at the final form:

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D Lewis

12 years ago

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Square, Paypal Here and Intuit GoPayment -- looks like it will be a war of the swipe fees. Also, Square is some much smaller that it make you wonder why the other two are so big.
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Jed Eastman

12 years ago

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I have the new Intuit swiper and its a much better design. This one looks pretty clunky. I wonder who designed the Intuit one?
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b

12 years ago

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Jay, one doesn't use thier own phone. the store/vendor would use theirs so no worry about dirtyness

and bepster.... core77 certainly screwed up with the headline. it should have ready paypal here by fuseproject.... even yves would want it to say that :-)
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DJ

12 years ago

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The world of identity theft just got that much bigger...
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Damien_

12 years ago

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This thing looks like garbage, and paypal has abhorrent business practices. I like the idea of adding a POS style checkout for itemized receipts though. Hopefull this will inspire square to add it in a future app update.
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John

12 years ago

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I'm pretty sure the askew triangle in the front is to stop the whole thing from swivelling on the headphone jack.

Not a big fan.
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scb

12 years ago

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jay, you don;t use your own smartphone. the store/vendor will have one.
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Jon

12 years ago

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Maybe a built in stylus that worked with an iPhone would be a possible solution. I can't imagine writing with your finger would be easy for a lot of people with dexterity issues in their hands.
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Bepster

12 years ago

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so... this is Behar on his own?
Not Fuse Project? Wonder why they made that decision.
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Jay

12 years ago

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Screw that. I still (like most people) put my smartphone to my face sometimes. I dont want a gazillion dirty hands all over my tech. I think ill stick with a pen for a little bit longer.
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