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Clinkle Wants To Become Your Wallet
vikingpower writes "Clinkle, a new mobile payments start-up, may or may not have succeeded where so many other efforts have fizzled by inventing a practical way to replace credit cards with smartphones. It's hard to say, though, since Clinkle won't say much about how its system works. Its website is, well ... slight. But a prominent group of Silicon Valley investors who do know what Clinkle is cooking up are acting as though it has achieved a breakthrough. On Thursday, Clinkle announced that it had raised $25 million in early financing from Accel Partners; Andreessen Horowitz; Intel; Intuit; Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com; Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal; and a long list of other investors with technology industry pedigrees. The Huffington Post has an article on Clinkle, or rather on Stanford students putting their degree on hold to go work at Clinkle. The Wall Street Journal [paywalled] mentions Clinkle having some 30-odd employees already."
Hmm. It makes a tinkling bells noise when you put in the Konami Code.
You know what else works just as well as a credit card that is way smaller and lighter than a cell phone, never needs recharging, works literally everywhere and already has proven, well-established limited liability for theft? A fucking credit card.
Oh, and nice analysis editor:
Clinkle, a new mobile payments start-up, may or may not have succeeded ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
You go to restaurant. Get receipt. Create a one-off closed account with user ID and one-off GUID with exactly the amount of receipt+tip transferred from your actual bank account. Unlike with a card, you just hand the server the user ID+GUID. They never know your full name and credit card number.
Or, if you are not one of those thirty "odd employees," you just pay with cash. Or you use a temporary c/c number with limited funds - many banks offer this service for free. Or you walk with the server to the payment terminal. There are several ways to pay that do not involve a third party.
This whole thing is designed to appeal to geeks who enjoy fiddling with computers. However everyone else will find it bothersome. It is just another step where you can make a mistake. All those eWallet companies are solving a problem that does not exist for the vast majority of people - and even to some geeks. I, personally, have no need of that service. I also have no desire to include another set of crooks into the payment chain.
I'm sure Clinkle's service is more open so that restaurants/etc. don't have to buy new hardware/software; it's probably only a fraction safer than actually giving your plastic card.
Where would these numbers go that a patron hands over to the server? Do they just type it into a browser, in a place where thousands of patrons and workers come and go every single day? It only takes a record in the HOSTS file, and a self-signed certificate, to impersonate the service. Businesses pay for secure terminals because they are secure. A mere computer in a corner cannot be called secure, if all it takes to compromise is to insert a USB stick and run a script.
I followed the link to their website and the first thing up is their demand my email address. WTF? I cannot just browse their site without them demanding my email?
Next thing, they demand I upgrade my browser. That's my business; it's their business to design their website to use HTML standards.
Do these jerks seriously expect people to sign on after a start like that?