Twitter creator wants to give away Square, his credit card payment gadget

Twitter was just the beginning. After dreaming up the innovative communication medium, Jack Dorsey is looking to revolutionize another core aspect of society -- money.

On Tuesday, Dorsey announced his new start-up, Square, which will let anyone with a cellphone or iPod become a merchant and accept credit card payments.

Square is a small plastic device that plugs into a gadget's headphone jack. Buyers swipe their credit cards through the machine, which then transmits the payment data to an application running on a connected iPhone or iPod Touch. (Android and Blackberry apps are in development, and computer software will be available later.)

You don't have to have the Square gadget or app to pay. You just need a credit card and an e-mail address to receive a receipt.

A select few cafes and small vendors are among Square's first beta testers. Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea in Venice will be one of the first in Southern California, starting as early as next week.

Beginning sometime early next year, Dorsey wants everyone to use Square.

"I think we're going to give the Squares away for free," Dorsey said on the phone from San Francisco on Tuesday, "because they're pretty cheap for us to make."

10 favorite gadgets of 2009

If you're still looking for a gift, the Times' Technology staff has compiled a list of our 10 favorite gadgets of 2009. Check out the full list, with details.

TechCrunch's Arrington alleges betrayal in Crunchpad demise

Michael Arrington, the mercurial head of TechCrunch, today lobbed a grenade across the blogosphere with a post that alleges betrayal, greed and theft of intellectual property in describing the demise of the Crunchpad, a tablet device Arrington and Fusion Garage had been jointly building.

In a lengthy post, Arrington accuses Fusion Garage Chief Executive Chandra Rathakrishnan of trying to oust Arrington from the project, which began a year ago as an effort to build a touch-screen device to surf the Internet. Here's an excerpt:

Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.

Thus, Arrington relegated the much vaunted Crunchpad to the FAIL bin.

The story doesn't end there, but could soon get uglier. Arrington said he "will almost certainly be filing multiple lawsuits against Fusion Garage, and possibly Chandra and his shareholders as individuals, shortly."

We've reached out to Rathakrishnan to get his version of the tale and will post an update should he reply.

-- Alex Pham

Photo: Michael Arrington, founder, editor TechCrunch, at his home in Northern California on June 6, 2008. Michael Arrington runs TechCrunch, the definititive guide of internet start-ups in Silicon Valley. Credit: Randi Lynn Beach / For the Los Angeles Times

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

A tech gadget guide that tells you how to buy

Does it really matter that the LCD TV has a contrast ratio of 40,000:1 or that the digital camera has a 12-megapixel resolution?

David Colker gets to the bottom of these befuddling questions ahead of the holiday shopping season. He offers an in-depth gadget guide that doesn't make suggestions about what to buy but about how to buy.

--Peter Pae

Pogoplug: A new device for new lifestyles?

The new Pogoplug. Credit: Cloud Engines.

One way to score a big hit in technology is to come up with not just a new gadget, but a new category. Of course, that is also a recipe for failure, because there's a risk that consumers don't think they need what you're selling.

That's the risk for Cloud Engines, a San Francisco company that makes something called the Pogoplug. They're calling it a "multimedia sharing device," in the hopes that people are looking for an easier way to share all the videos, photos and music that are now defining their digital lives.

The Pogoplug sells for $129. You plug it into your router, and then you plug a storage device -- like an external hard drive or a flash drive -- into it. You have then created what company Chief Executive Daniel Putterman calls "your personal cloud." Given the way the "cloud computing" buzzword reached the stratosphere this year, he may be onto something.

The sharing part comes in letting you give anyone access to your stuff without your ever having to upload it or e-mail it.

Engadget liked an earlier version of the product but wished it had Wi-Fi and ports for extra devices. Today the company announces the extra ports, but still no Wi-Fi.

And I can report that photos and material shared with me from a Pogoplug device worked seamlessly, like looking at any website.

-- Dan Fost

Twitter-equipped bathroom scale tells the world how much you weigh

This bathroom scale knows how much you weigh and it can blab it to your Twitter friends. Credit: Withings.

The most embarrassing new tech product of the year just got more embarrassing.

Last month, we let you know about the Wi-Fi Body Scale, the first bathroom scale equipped with a wireless connection to send your weight and body fat information directly to your Web page and iPhone.

But weight, there's more.

Today the French company behind the scale, Withings, announced it has added Twitter capability to the scale, enabling the user to automatically tweet the weight/fat info to followers.

In a news release, Withings declared the Twitter function would be a great help to users, "further motivating them by sharing their progress with followers."

Right.

What's next for Withings? An app to let the Twitterverse know how much debt you're carrying? How about a public questionnaire to rate how far you are from achieving your life dreams?

Come to think of it, either might be preferable to letting the weight info hit Twitter. This is Los Angeles.

-- David Colker

Google bets big on mobile advertising in $750-million acquisition of AdMob

Google Inc. has shown which way it believes the winds are blowing by forking over $750 million for mobile advertising firm AdMob, one of the Web giant's largest acquisitions to date. 

As AdMob itself has described, the volume and effectiveness of mobile advertising has been skyrocketing over the last several years as more advanced smartphones have caught on, making it easier to deliver more kinds of graphical and text-based advertising to phone-toting consumers.

In a recent report, AdMob said that the number of mobile ads it served had increased nearly 540% from September 2007, to 10.2 billion per month from 1.6 billion.  

As mobile phones morph further into pocket Internet devices, and consumers grow accustomed to performing online functions like search, gaming and instant messaging on their handsets, opportunities for advertising companies like Google will grow rapidly, analysts expect. 

Google says the number of searches performed by smartphone users has increased by a factor of five over the last two years, led primarily by iPhone users and owners of Google Android phones. At least a dozen new Google-powered phones, such as last week's launch of Verizon's Droid, are expected to be released in the coming year.  

Google also says that marketer spending on mobile advertising is growing at 30% annually.

AdMob was founded in 2006 by Omar Hamoui, a Web entrepreneur looking to generate traffic for his mobile-based website. The company has taken funding from venture firms such as Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Northgate, and the company's clients have included Ford, Coca-Cola, Electronic Arts and Paramount Pictures.

Google, which already owns a major stake in mobile advertising with its DoubleClick Mobile unit, said it expects regulatory scrutiny of the AdMob deal but hopes the pact will be approved within a matter a months.

-- David Sarno

Quitting smoking isn't child's play. Or is it?

You can play music on the iPhone with the Leaf Trombone app. Researchers believe they can come up with a similar app for smokers to help them quit smoking. Credit: Peter DaSilva/Los Angeles Times .

In a few years if you see a person nervously blowing on his cellphone for five minutes, do not call the cops. He might not be a crazy person who forgot to take his meds; he might just be a smoker trying to quit smoking.

Columbia University's Teachers College announced today that it received a  $150,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, through the foundation's Health Games Research national program to develop a smart phone app that emulates the physiological responses smokers get from smoking.

The first apps are likely to be for Apple Inc.'s iPhone or iPod Touch. The user would control the game by blowing into the device's microphone in response to different color and sound stimuli coming from the handset. Researchers hope that it will be able to elicit the same brain patterns, heart rate levels and relaxation responses that smokers get from smoking. The game, Lit: A Game Intervention for Nicotine Smokers, is expected to be released in about two years.

Breath therapy has been used to help smokers quit smoking for a while, but it's hoped that the game will  disseminate this technique to the masses. "You don't have to learn anything; the game will cause you to breathe the right way," said Charles Kinzer, professor of education in the Communication, Computing and Technology Program and the Game Research Lab at Teachers College.

Technology is being used in another way to help smokers quit smoking. Researchers at the GRAP Occupational Psychology Clinic and the University of Quebec in Gatineau recently found that smokers who crushed virtual cigarettes experienced a significant reduction in nicotine addiction.

Tobacco use is still the leading cause of death in the United States, according to a statement from Kinzer and the Lit project team. It added that 70% of adult smokers say they want to quit, and more than 40% try to quit each year.

Kinzer said, "If we can capitalize on the motivational aspect of games and the availability of mobile devices, there is tremendous potential to positively affect heath and wellness for smokers who want to quit, and this would have implications for healthcare costs as well."

--Melissa Rohlin

For that pampered pooch: a RFID-enabled automatic doggie door

This Pomeranian lives the posh life but the doggie door is so yesterday. Utilizing a smart chip on the dog's collar, the Plexidor Electronic Door would automatically open the door for the pooch. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times.

Dogs that open doggie doors with their noses are such ruffians. Those ill-mannered animals will probably never get a date or a bone.

Sophisticated pets, with deep-pocketed owners, can now use garage-like doggie doors that open and close electronically when a pet wearing a collar with a radio-frequency-identification chip approaches. The doors only open for the pet with the RFID chip, keeping out unwanted visitors.

The chips are widely used at automated toll booths and for tracking airline baggage.

Plexidor Electronic Pet Doors cost $129 to $800 depending on the size and model.  To see a picture, check out our L.A. Unleashed blog.

"It allows the pets to go outside when they have to, not when you're able to let them out," said Plexidor President Joe Ambrose. He added: "For the pet owner, it is very helpful in preventing pet messes in the house from the pet having to hold it too long."

-- Melissa Rohlin

Microsoft says lost Sidekick data will be restored to users

A 2007 Microsoft/T-Mobile Sidekick. Credit: Krisopher Avila / Flickr

The unusual case of the missing Sidekick data may be nearing its conclusion.

Microsoft Corp. announced this morning that most or all users of its Sidekick mobile device might indeed see their lost data again. The announcement came after a week of worry that users' contacts, notes, photos and other virtual property may have been lost for good when company servers failed.

"We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible," wrote Roz Ho, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Premium Mobile Experiences, adding that the company now believed the outage affected a minority of Sidekick users.

"We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the backup," Ho explained in a statement. "We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data."

Ho said Microsoft would offer another update on the data restoration by Saturday.

If indeed the data are restored, Microsoft may dull the negative echoes of the episode, which initially looked to be one of the worst incidents of online data loss in memory, with many of the device's reported 1 million users suffering a complete wipe of many months of irreplaceable information. At least two lawsuits have been filed against Microsoft and Sidekick carrier T-Mobile.

In an e-mail Wednesday evening, Microsoft sought to show that the problem was isolated to servers run by its Danger Inc. subsidiary, which it said was not part of its main "cloud" infrastructure. "Other and future Microsoft mobile products and services are entirely based on Microsoft technologies and Microsoft’s cloud service platform," the company said.

-- David Sarno