Dwolla Corp. has launched a mobile location-based payments system called Dwolla Spots.
The Spots system, which today runs only on Apple Inc. devices, "represents the first real marriage between the mobile payments industry and location-based technologies," Ben Milne, Dwolla's co-founder and chief executive, said in a press release Wednesday.
Milne said the combination "leapfrogs" near-field communication, the technology most commonly favored as the means for enabling point of sale payments from mobile phones.
Dwolla, of Des Moines, Iowa, charges 25 cents a transaction. Dwolla said it would add Spots this spring to apps on phones running Google Inc.'s Android and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software.
The app finds nearby merchants that can receive Dwolla payments and allows consumers to complete a purchase from within the app. Money is transferred in real time, Dwolla said.
Merchants that accept Dwolla payments can also design their own avatars to appear on the Spots map.
