Square

[Ranking score revised 29 April 2010; based on additional research]

Everybody's talkin bout Square, the well-funded, highly valued hot startup that's looking to bring payments and credit card transactions to the smartphone -- cheaply, easily, painlessly as possible.

The payments infrastructure is extranordinarily impressive; one of the planet's best tech success stories. But it still seems needlessly costly, especially for small-time vendors, and that whole buying a separate data line and maintaining paper receipts and workling through a single clearinghouse are so 20th century.

Let's see how SQARE does using my Great Leveling algorithm, shall we!