Two former employees of AdMob have established a start-up company that has built a piece of software that can put a smartphone camera into use in order to scan credit cards and then automatically transmit the details of the cards at the time of processing a mobile website transaction.
Mike Mettler and Josh Bleecher Snyder have set up the Card.io start-up that raised $1 million in seed round of funding.
Instead of going after retailers, card.io has set its eyes on iOS developers in e-commerce, local, ticketing, travel in addition to daily deal apps by inviting them for a private beta launch. On the other hand, card.io has teamed up with Mogo Tix for event tickets, TaskRabbit for local services, and then SamaSource for donations.
Mike Mettler, co-founder and CEO of card.io, believes that software will turn up trumps over hardware-dependent payment solutions in the coming years. The reason being that software is easily scalable and improved upon quickly. Also that every device owner can be reached from the word go; just that one needs to have a phone and then it is just point and pay.
At the moment, the software works only on Apple based products.