Glenbrook at This Week's ETA Annual Meeting and Expo

Notes from ETA 2007

Each year, as ETA approaches, I try and predict what the vendors will be showcasing in their booths on the tradeshow floor. A few years ago, payment enabling Blackberrys, Palm Pilots, and other PDAs with clip on card readers and Bluetooth printers were all the rage. RF payment devices were big last year as were dial to IP converters to enable older terminals to connect over broadband lines.

This year, everybody (and I mean everybody) had RF readers on all their terminals and integrated point of sale systems. There was not one IP converter vendor in sight, and the magical cradles that turned your Palm Pilot into a card reading/receipt printing point of sale terminals are nowhere to be seen either.

So who/what were dominating the sea of booths? First, lots of new POS hardware providers from various parts of the world - TechTrex, Blue Bamboo, PAX, and a host of others promoting low cost terminals from Taiwan, Korea, and China.

This was in addition to Exadigm, an old face offering low cost, fully modularized wired and wireless systems running on Linux, who was finally able to announce their first Class A certification (Chase Paymentech).

Some of the hopefuls trying to crack the US market were running proprietary or Windows CE operating systems underneath. And all face the HUGE challenge that it took Exadigm years to overcome - Class A certification. I doubt most, if any, of these new guys will be back next year.

Also on the device front, the wireless hardware and services guys were back, bigger and telling success stories - Apriva, Way Systems, and others. Seems anyone offering hardware has to have a few wireless solutions in their product offering. If nothing else, the devices are getting sexier and sexier and seem to be gaining in popularity.

In addition to the POS wannabes, there the number of companies offering to factor merchant receivables (well, more like loans secured against future card receivables) seemed somewhat higher than in prior years. I hope that's not a sign of bad economic times ahead. Also a ton of PCI/security consultants/vendors.

My favorite booth was one that I stumbled on last year in the very corner of the show - from SellitSafe. They had slightly better positioning this year, and anyone who bothered to venture near the myriad of screens invariably seen muttering "Holy #*$&". That was my reaction when I first saw them last year. They tap into hacker chat rooms on a regular basis and monitor those sites for compromised card numbers (with full CVV2/CVC2 in sight), SSNs, etc. Thousands and thousands of full 16 digit account numbers scrolling through the screens almost faster than you can read them. Holy &^$^@ is right. Their goal is to get the fraud companies, card systems/associations, ecommerce merchants, and others to incorporate that data into their fraud decisioning. Their CEO, Steve Peisner, has been on Good Morning America (or some show like that) based on his rather fun Good Samaritan habit of calling people whose data has been compromised and telling them so (confirming that he's for real by reciting back the person's card number, user ID, password, etc.). His goal is to get on Oprah, so if any PaymentsNews readers can help him..

I also had a chance to meet with one of the executives from GratisCard, whose stated goal is to be the 5th credit card brand (I'm not going to say much about them just yet).

Anyway, lots more booths to visit.