Hi HN, I'm working on a project and I just wanted to get a general feel from peers with a pulse on public perception.
I'm caught between working on hardware to read banking cards via the audio jack and via optics (i.e. Card IO). Also as a heads up, I'm keenly aware of Apple phasing out the audio jack in favor of their lightning interface and the pros and cons of both implementations.<p>The problem is while this optic based data extraction is low-cost and democratizes card data gathering amongst other things, I don't believe it will grow in popularity because people generally don't trust the technology with private data. The concept of you putting your banking card up in a specific frame and a snapshot taken (even though it's not saved) will not resonate with a society already plagued with various privacy concerns. It will also be hard to process the numbers on older, heavily use cards with recessed numbers etc.<p>I'm curious to know what you all think about this growing movement of data extraction at the cross section of mobile payment processing.<p>Thank you.
To be honest I don't see room in the mobile payments market anymore for third parties. I see Apple pay,Google wallet,PayPal and Amazon taken up 95% of the pie in 5-10 years.