Dwolla, a PayPal competitor that boasts itself as being built for consumers, developers, and merchants, has been making some strides to innovate the online payment industry. Their latest innovation is called Proxi and allows you to pay people or places near you, pay vendors on the go, and accept payments wherever you are without credit card fees. Announced on the Dwolla blog last week, the new service called Proxi, enables smartphones running the Dwolla app to interact with others without the latest hardware like NFC that Google is promoting or dongles that Square and others use.
Dwolla Proxi is currently in invite-only beta with an iOS app. You can request a beta invite or sit back and wait for this technology to become public.
I think, as a merchant, accepting money from your customers through any channel that they want to pay is an added convenience to them. You can transfer your money from Dwolla to your bank account, so it all ends up in the same spot. Dwolla also has really low fees.