Apple has acquired a Montreal-based Canadian company Mobeewave for $100 million. The tech startup makes financial payment processing easy with smartphones using a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip. With this technology, a user can make payments by tapping their smartphone or credit card to another smartphone, the Verge reports.
With this acquisition, it is believed that Apple will turn iPhones into mobile payment terminals, even though the company already operates Apple Pay to facilitate payments in retail stores. With Mobeewave, any iPhone user can accept or make payments without the need for regular card readers as is usually the case. Most iPhones manufactured by Apple since iPhone 6 have NFC chips, and this will make payments with iPhones easy once the function goes live.
The story was first reported by Bloomberg which revealed that Apple also retained all Mobeewave employees following the acquisition. Both companies would not comment on the transaction but an Apple spokesperson simply said that “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans”.
In January, Apply acquired Xnor.ai, a Seattle-based AI startup, and also acquired virtual reality startup NextVR. Xnor.ai is known to operate AI on mobile devices instead of in the cloud, and NextVR is a partner with NBA and other sports entities. The company also took over Dark Sky, a weather app, this year. Apple shut down the Android version of Dark Sky on August 1 and might be adding the features of the new weather app into its iOS 14.
Source: theverge.com