There’s an awful lot of Apple and advertising stories around today, so it was nice to see this twist on mobile barcode payments emerge. It’s an interesting service from Cimbal Inc., a Californian company, that sees point-of-sale barcodes being generated by the merchant rather than the consumer.
What’s the story?
Point-of-sale is an incredible application of barcodes, and it is being used by some heavy hitting retailers including Starbucks and Target. The way it works is quite simple: a consumer downloads a barcode onto their mobile device. A special scanner at the retailers checkout/point-of-sale reads the barcode, and takes action on it. Quite often this “action” takes the form of a discount or reduction in price – in that way, a consumer can store a lot of coupons on their device without needing to carry a wad of paper coupons around.
What Cimbal is announcing is slightly different. Like many other services, this use of barcodes will allow consumers to make payments both on-line and in person… but the consumer won’t be the one wielding the barcode, the merchant will. In an interesting move, the Cimbal service will also allow consumers to make person-to-person transaction – you can generate a barcode that will another person to transfer money to you.
How does it work?
Step one is to open a Cimbal account. This is a PIN protect account that is then linked to a savings or deposit account of your choice. Once you’ve done that, you can start generating barcodes. Each barcode you create represents a single transaction, that can be repeated multiple times. You put all the information needed into the barcode: including what item is being purchased, and the amount of money to be transferred. Anyone with a Cimbal account can then snap that barcode with their cameraphone, and the transaction will be automatically completed between the two bank accounts that are attached to your Cimbal accounts.
What we think?
The service is in private beta at the moment, so don’t get too excited just yet. Cimbal is being extremely cagey about further details – it claims that the transactions are processed IMMEDIATELY, but gives no details on how. Perhaps most importantly, while this service is an interesting version of an existing system, it doesn’t give consumers any particularly great reasons to jump on board immediately. However, Cimbal does claim that it will introduce an incentive-system to attract consumers by the time the service is ready to launch.
Point-of-sale (POS) is a computer — what a consumer might call a cash register. So POS is being used by every retailer – not just a few heavy hitters.