Aaron Schaub

Square was born extremely rapidly: It began as an idea in February 2009, and the new company came out of stealth mode just yesterday--that's a window of just ten months, which is swift even though the idea behind the device is extremely simple. Essentially it's a small piece of electronics that translates the signals from a magnetic strip reader into an audio signal. This audio signal, corresponding to the data on a credit card swiped through the device, goes in through the headphone/microphone socket of an iPhone, where it's decoded by the special Square app and wirelessly routed off to Square's remote servers which then perform the usual banking jiggerypokery that more ordinary credit card readers do. - Aaron Schaub