Silicon Valley Nation: Not hip enough to be Square?

SAVANNAH, Ga.--A flip of the wrist, and the card slips quietly through the tiny, antenna-like iPhone/Android plug-in.
 
Type in the cost, the tip and it charges your credit card immediately. Want a receipt? Click "yes" and it its sent a split-second later to the e-mail address on file with your card provider.
 
This is Square, the latest incarnation of technology feeding on itself and making the world a more well-lubricated, productive place to live.

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Cabbies are all over the technology because it's easy to use (they're already throwing out their dashboard GPS systems in favor of iPhone and Android phones with the same functionality). Remember those card-reader systems on the dashboard or behind the front seat? If you didn't have a number of nightmarish experiences trying to use your card with one of those, consider yourself lucky.

This is how the future is getting a lot more interesting -- a lot faster. Not long ago, semiconductor vendors moved into the platform era, building FPGAs, SoCs and ASSPs that would support multiple applications, not just a discrete function. That mindset is now catching fire uptown, at the corner of embedded systems, mobile technology and open-source software.

Consequences

What does this mean for design engineers? Well, if you're in the consumer space, more pain because it's all about cost. Square gives the device and app away for free. Its model is a 2.75 percent charge on all transactions. (If you're curious about the technology, check out these Flickr photos from Adam Davis of his Square reader teardown and what it sounds like running the card through the reader on this short YouTube clip). 

If you work in other areas like industrial or automotive, it should inspire possibilities, but sometimes our imaginations seize up. Talking earlier this week with Ian Chen, senior vice president with Sensor Platforms, he's even unsure where things are headed -- and he's at the heart of the Internet of things.

We'll be featuring Chen as a technologist to watch in our upcoming EE Times 40th anniversary issue and app. I tried to push him into the future. Will the phone, as it's currently evolved--that is, into something other than a "phone"--be supplanted as a multi-functional platform by some other device? He said:

"Even Star Trek has a communicator badge. That's still a phone! I think it's probably still going to be a human-to-digital device. The only other device is an implant, and I'm not sure I like that too much. It may not look like a phone. It might look like your belt buckle."

Technologies like Square's reader and its application are so forehead-slappingly obvious that it's amazing we all didn't come up with the same idea last year. We're smart people, right? Right....?

In any case, a switch has been flipped. Technology is now feeding on itself at a much faster rate thanks to smartphones and open-source software, wireless systems and Al Gore's baby. We've now enabled millions of people to design their own solutions.

How do we keep up with that pace in electronics, where quickening design cycles still have a certain cadence: from specification to design to manufacture and test to Moore's Law itself?

Related stories:

--Sensor Platforms extends library to mobile apps
--Sensor startup closes $6.6 million VC round