Magensa’s QwicKey offers passwordmanagement
and form-filling with a unique type of two-factor authentication. You protect your data with a master password, of course, but you must also swipe one of your credit cards through the supplied reader to finish unlocking the data. You can register as many credit cards (or other mag-stripe cards) as you like. It’s a nice product, and the updates they’ve made merit a new review.
But the Magensa product that wowed me today was iDynamo with QwickPay. It’s a “jacket” that plugs into the bottom of youriPhone and turns it into a device for securely handling credit card transactions.
Magensa CEO Mimi Hart demonstrated the device. An app on the iPhone accepts encrypted swipe data from the reader and communicates with the central office, quickly returning a message indicating that the card was or wasn’t accepted. Like QwicKey, iDynamo includes Magensa’s MagnePrint technology. Briefly, the magnetic stripe isn’t just data but actually has a unique “fingerprint.” MagnePrint technology enables the reader to distinguish the original card from a copy cloned by a skimmer.