The word is that once upon a time, eBay’s PayPal tried to buy Jack Dorsey’s Square. Knowing Dorsey’s ambition, it was obvious that wasn’t going to work out. What was clear though – PayPal knew that it had to get a piece of the non-web transaction business and jump on the big “people-to-people economy” trend that is starting to gain traction.

Today, the company announced it’s buying small Boston-based mobile-payment startup Fig Card, who’se founders Max Metral and Hasty Granbery will go to work for eBay’s Paypal division.

The FigCard frames itself as “a new way to use your fancy iPhone to pay for things”– (note – you can also use your fancy Android and select fancy Blackberry). Consumers download the app and use it at participating retail stores. Merchants accept the mobile payments in stores through a USB device that plugs into the cash register or point-of-sale terminal. The cashier never sees the customer’s credit card number.

The acquisition fit’s into Paypal’s strategy to acquire  existing technology and talent to help build it’s mobile and platform businesses. In a blog post announcing the deal, Peter Chu, PayPal’s senior director of mobile, local and new ventures said Fig Card fit Paypal’s vision of a future that not separates payment from the PC.

We loved their approach to point-of-sale, particularly because it was driven by the same vision that we have at PayPal – in the future,  transactions can be as smart as a computer and not as dumb as paper. We won’t need our physical wallets. We’ll be able to pay any way we want, from any device, anywhere in the world with both flexibility and privacy.

Keith Rabois, who runs Square and was a key executive during the pre-eBay days at PayPal recently told us his company was “going after 26 million folks who are not merchants in a classic sense.” I guess, so does PayPal.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

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In today`s deal every customer wants their product that is perfect for them and they want it right away. They do not want to wait for delivery, they do not want to wait for a return call, and they want quality products. So this has to make you speculate how we are able to keep up with these high demands.

To keep up with the high demands we have modern electronics gadgets to keep us on track and help us stay connected with family, co-workers and customers. This is a very important feature to business owners, if they are not in steady connection with their customers they may find another provider for that product. The cell phone is something most people have; we are now available all the time. A large portion of the worlds population do not even have a land line in the home anymore, but why should we, we are never home to answer it.

You are checking out at the grocery store, and your items just get scanned in and the machine adds it up for the cashier. We would not know what to do with ourselves if we had to wait for the cashier to add everything up by hand.

And of course our MP3 players, they not only play music now but have many other functions. They play our music, store our pictures, keep our calendar, tell us the time and even read us books. We need these electronics gadgets to keep up with our crazy schedules.

NEC’s partner robot PaPeRo has been put to work as a cashier. Combined with NEC’s Twinpos self-checkout system, the robot can look cute while taking your cash.

Angry Internet Man here with a chip on his shoulder and a shoot promo to cut. This pre-order “bonus” video game content bullshit has to stop. Lives are at stake.

The latest example of this chicanery is BioShock 2. If you pre-order the game from GameStop, den of sin and other bad stuff, you get two exclusive multi-player characters. Well, pardon me for being a jerk and buying the game from Steam (where the pre-order bonus is a free copy of the orignial BioShock, as if I didn’t already have that—twice). Now I have to envy all the other neighborhood kids who get said characters? You know, I always hated those kids.

Granted, the odds of me playing BioShock 2’s multi-player mode are right around zero, so it’s not a huge deal, but there is a certain principle at stake here: why the heck should I have to buy—and pre-order, no less!—the game from GameStop to get access to the entire game? Why punish people who choose to shop at a different location?

And this is a benign pre-order bonus, extra multi-player skins. Who cares? Let’s look at something far more malignant: EA’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Did you know that unless you pre-order the game from, yes, GameStop, you won’t be able to play a certain multi-player mode for an entire month? Let’s say Wal-Mart is the only store in town; you couldn’t shop at GameStop if you wanted to. So you go over there, ask the nice cashier for a copy, come home, plop it into your PS3, and find out, oh, hey, I can’t play a mode that I paid for for four weeks. Awesome! Thanks, EA and GameStop!

(I don’t even understand how that’s legal, buying ostensibly the same product from one store but getting a hell of a lot more with your purchase than the guy who bought the same thing next door. Imagine buying a car from one dealership that included working high beams, but buying it from another store you get jack-shit for lights.)

Dragon Age: Origins had some pre-order nonsense, too. Basically, you had to buy the game 18 different times to unlock every single piece of “extra” content. What?

Mass Effect 2 rewarded armor and weapons—not superfluous multi-player skins, then—to people who pre-ordered the game from GameStop. Again, tough cookies, kid who bought the game from Target. You should have done the decent thing and driven an hour and a half out of your way to pre-order the game from almighty GameStop.

Let’s be fair: sometimes all this “extra” stuff is made available to everyone via Xbox Live or PSN after a certain amount of time. In SmackDown vs. Raw 2010, which came out last October, for example, Stone Cold Steve Austin was a GameStop pre-order exclusive (notice a pattern?) for a while, but now he can be purchased for 80 Microsoft Points. The stupidity of having to pay for something that’s already on the disc (or that could just as easily be included on the disc) aside, I do applaud THQ for at least making him available. Well, “applaud,” more like kick up dirt and say, “Gee, you guys shouldn’t have, really.”

What’s the purpose of this exclusive content stuff anyway? So GameStop can send a press release to Kotaku and JoyStiq and Techland a few days after a game’s release touting how many copies it sold? See, investors, people still buy their games from us! Yeah, of course, because you’re strong-arming publishers to incorporate extra content deals lest you devote precious shelf space to some other game whose publisher played ball with us. (I have zero information to that effect, it’s just what it feels like.)

When I buy a game, I want to know that I’ve bought the game. I don’t want to find out on CrunchGear of all places that I screwed up because I didn’t buy it at Store A, and thus lose out on armor or weapons or whatever the hell else. Why is this so hard to understand?

So you have a choice, gamers: participate in this charade by genuflecting at the shrine of GameStop (and others), thus perpetuating the garbage of “exclusive” content, or take your money elsewhere. That’s the only way it’s going to stop, too: refusing to shop at these stores that offer “exclusive” content, which only serves to harm your fellow gamers.

To arms and so forth!