innerfence has developed an iPhone App called the Credit Card Terminal.  It is a thin application that acts as a front end and uses an Authorize.net Merchant account using the Authorize.net API over SSL. Looks pretty neat and a useful option for mobile acceptance of credit cards.

Looks like innerfence is a Authorize.net reseller, since you can use any authorize.net merchant account - I suggest you shop around the the best rates, theirs appear to be a little high.

I’ll put this in the "Why didn’t I think of that ?" category.

EDIT:  Check out this link to the innerfence blog where there is a video on the app, and its integration to another iPhone App - Ring It Up Point of Sale.

Years ago I assisted a company that developed magstripe readers that would operate in vending machines, copiers, laundry machines for a project related to college campus cards.  My part was to assist them with both the message formats, connection methods, as well as selecting transaction types and device captures modes (Host Based Capture works the best in this model, BTW) for integration to a payment switch and authorization host and ultimately certifying the different devices.

While I was in Dallas last week I took a snap shot of a vending machine that had a similar device:

These are not new, but I don’t visit Vending Machines like I used to and don’t see that many Vending Machines that accept payment cards. This appears to be a model from USA Tech called the ePort. I got a water and coke for a total of $3.00, btw

I received a MSR505c Card Reader/Writer in the mail today. I use and have a need to create test cards that have magstripes for a variety of purposes; The main one being a way to test/demo our issuer based products from Point-of-Sale (POS) systems and payment terminals.

I thought I create a short screencast to show how this works, which is provided below:

Some considerations to note:

It is extremely easy to "clone" a payment card using a device such as this, and the entry point from a cost and availability perspective is low (~$300 range). In a follow-up blog post, I’ll write about Maktek’s MagneSafe and MagnePrint products to detect card cloning at a magstripe level.