In September last year Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey announced that he would be launching a new startup: Square.  This service would provide IPhone users with a dongle-like square add-on that would allow them to take credit card transactions my simply swiping them through the square and entering their payment details using the phone.  You can even use the IPhone interface to scrawl your signature with your finger.  The receipt is then emailed through to the buyer and the who transaction is logged with geo-location.  The benefit of all this is that the entire transaction is kept clean, simple and paperless.

Impressively, the device plugs into the IPhone via the audio input jack and is synced up to software on the phone.  Initial beta models of Square have been made solely for the IPhone, however it is expected that it will be modified to work with Blackberry’s and even perhaps older models of mobile phones.  There is little doubt that Square will prove to be a very innovative and useful application for those doing business on the move.

You can follow Square’s development via their Twitter profile.

Plucky developers have been turning their talents to building various instruments that can be played on the IPhone.  This has inevitably led to the forming of IPhone bands:

This is all well and good, but I believe that we should think bigger.  Would it be possible to gather together enough musical Iphone applications that we’d be able to form an IPhone orchestra?  For this we’re not going to emulate an old school Classical Orchestra or even an Early Romantic Orchestra – we’re bringing things right up to date with a Modern Orchestra which of course, looks like this:

So now we have to find some instruments for each of the sections.  Let’s take care of the woodwind family first.

No one has been posh enough to develop a bassoon or clarinet app yet, but we have found our flute:

Next we need to fill up the brass section.  I’d love to see a tuba app, but for now we’ll have to make do with this rather lovely trumpet:

So we have enough to get a nice little melody going but how can we add a bit more rhythm?  For the percussion section the IPhone Drummer will take care of the snare drum, bass drum, timpani, gong, cymbals and triangle!  I’ve never seen an orchestra with a turntable or slide whistle, though…shame!

Our orchestra is starting to come together now.  Let’s add a little piano:

And finally – the string section.  There’s a nice selection of applications out there including this rather clever violin app…

…and even a realistic sounding harp!

And with our ‘orchestra’ complete, all that is left is for some clever musical type to compose a piece for it!  You never know – we may still have something up our sleeve yet.