Earlier this morning, Square announced a new component of their business model tailored for small business owners, the Square Stand. Square Stand is curiously released on the heels of Business in a Box, a complete point-of-sale system featuring a cash register, optional printer, and iPad stand by Heckler Design. Combining an integrated card reader, swivel, and an accessories hub for plugging in supported hardware such as select barcode scanners, the Square Stand turns the iPad into a central sales terminal.

 Ready to use in minutes, Square Stand works with Square Register, the free point of sale application, and gives merchants access to real-time analytics, robust reporting, and a delightful experience for their customers. Square Stand features an integrated card reader that keeps information secure from swipe to payment, and easily connects to the hardware accessories businesses need, including a receipt printer, kitchen printer, cash drawer, and barcode scanner. Merchants can lock their iPad in place and secure the stand to their countertop, making it easy to tilt and rotate the stand and complete orders quickly. Square Stand works with an iPad 2 or 3, with a version for iPads with Lightning connectors available later this year.

Emphasis mine: the Square Stand currently supports recent models with the 30-pin connector. The benefit of having a Square Stand is for the professional appearance, sturdier reader, added security, and integration with a wider variety of accessories, but the total cost for the new stand and Square’s recommend accessories is $796. Business owners on a budget still might be better served by Business in a Box, which offers the basics and a couple of traditional Square Readers for only $499 with a printer. Square Stand itself is expected to be available online and at retail outlets like Best Buy later this year for $299.

Analog Camera looks like it’s going to be a fun little camera app. Like Clear, the app is gesturally driven, full of fun sounds, and it looks fast. It’ll be coming to the App Store later this month.

MapBox is a platform for creating custom maps, integrating with social networks like Foursquare and services like Hipmunk to provide relevant points of interest on top of data sourced from the OpenStreetMap project. MapBox Streets is a component of the platform that lets developers beautifully stylize OpenStreetMap data, providing an opportunity for businesses to customize map views to better fit their brand.

MapBox is announcing vector tiles for MapBox Streets, which will offer developers working with the platform a single format for powering custom maps that can be shared on mobile devices and on the web.

TileMill, our open source design studio, is going to relaunch with vector tiles fully integrated to be a powerhouse tool for custom cartography. Design iterations can happen in seconds and be applied to a full global vector tileset without lengthy downloads, imports, or time spent tuning database queries. In short, anyone will be able to make a totally custom branded map, of the entire globe, that is lighting fast on every device.

As we’ve seen with Apple’s Maps and Google Maps, vectors make for a lightweight, data efficient way to display what’s around you. Vectors load much more quickly than rasterized images, and their small footprint allows map data to be cached on devices without taking up lots of storage space. MapBox claims that, when powered by vector tiles, their MapBox Streets’ dataset of the entire world can fit onto a single thumb drive.

[via Daniel Jalkut]

AppleInsider writes,

Users from Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands and Russia are reporting the appearance of Apple’s new two-step verification feature, which was previously limited to the US, UK, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand.

As updates are rolling out, Apple’s support documentation hasn’t been updated to reflect the changes. For those that now have access to Apple’s Two-Step Verification for your Apple IDs, I’ve written a comprehensive how-to that should clear up questions about anything you might see as you go through the process.

Mel Martin from TUAW has a nice overview of Amazon’s latest iOS app, which utilizes the capabilities of their Amazon Cloud Drive for storing up to 5GB of photos for free from your iOS device.

Amazon offers more free storage than Apple, and Apple will only store up to 1000 of your photos for 30 days compared to about 2000 photos with no expiration from Amazon. With Apple, after 30 days you must sync to your main computer. I see the Amazon service as a nice extra backup to what Apple offers.

If you use Amazon Cloud Drive, you can also access documents, music, and photographs through the desktop application for transferring files to and from the web.