SmartPhones are looking to take over our lives.
They’ve replaced a multitude of every day items and soon they could replace the plastic you carry in your wallet.
Developers are working on apps that would allow your smartphone to act as a credit card, USA Today reports.
The idea is that instead of reaching into your wallet for your credit card, you’ll instead drag out your phone and swipe it to pay — either via embedded software in the phone itself, or a small chip that attaches to it.
Market tracker Juniper Research says one in every six mobile phone users will have a phone able to make mobile payments by 2014.
T&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile formed Isis, a mobile payments network launching in 2011 that will let subscribers pay with smartphones.
Here’s just a a few of the updates on the horizon:
•Google’s upcoming update to its Android phone system software will include technology to pay bills via an embedded chip, the company said.
•Start-ups Boku, Obopay, Zoompass and Square all offer ways to pay for goods with smartphones.
One start-up sure to get more attention is in Palo Alto, Calif., a few miles from the headquarters of Google and Apple. Bling Nation, which services the “local” section of PayPal’s app for the iPhone and iPad, has signed up the city of Palo Alto, Stanford University gift stores and dozens of merchants on University Avenue, the city’s main drag.
Customers attach a small Bling chip to their phone. To pay, they swipe the phone/chip at a Bling terminal near the cash register. That taps their PayPal account for the transaction. EBay owns PayPal.
“Everybody always has their phone on them,” says Jean-Paul Coupal, who runs the Coupa Cosas coffee shops in Palo Alto. “The wallet, sometimes they leave it. It’s bulky. But paying with your phone is nice and easy.”
At Sprouts Cafe in Palo Alto, Bling is used for 20% to 25% of transactions after only two months. “I am amazed” by the response, co-owner Tina Almendras says.
The advantage for retailers: Bling charges a fee of about 1.5%, about half the usual credit card fee. “That’s a big savings,” says Tommy Fehrenbach, manager of economic development for the city, which encourages citizens to pay utility and parking bills via Bling. “It really helps the bottom line.”
Bling is also accepted by a handful of merchants in San Francisco; Lamar and La Junta, Colo.; Clarksville, Tenn.; Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; and Mount Pleasant, Texas.
Gwenn Bezard, an analyst at research firm Aite Group, says Bling is the “best positioned” of the start-ups because it has aligned with social network Facebook. Bling encourages merchants to offer special discounts to Facebook members.
Co-CEO Meyer Malka says Bling software will be compatible with the technologies used by the phone carriers and Google.
Of course, puts more stress on you if you lose your smartphone or something happens to it.
Don’t the Japanese already have this with their cell phones?
The problem with having it on phones here is that somebody has to be abpe to make money off of the feature.
If it can’t be privatized and monetized to within an inch of its existence, then nobody gets to have it.
nice idea but a few potential drawbacks.
* rfid in passports got a lot of people annoyed. this will drive some people insane. now not only can you be tracked but you open up the potential to pick your pocket at a distance.
* security you say? name a wireless protocol that has not been broken.
* the range is too small to do that? google blue tooth sniper rifle and find plans to build a device to connect to blue tooth class ii devices (100 foot range) over half a mile.
until these technologies can do everything that normal cash money can do it will never replace money. here in ireland anti terrorism laws in the 1980s made it more and more difficult to open a bank account to prevent fraud. now 10% of the adult population don’t have bank accounts (we even had a minister of finance with out a bank account at one time 🙂 ) unless this technology can reach that subset of the population then it can never be ubiquitous.
just my 2c.
Did we learn nothing from BSG? By putting all this important information on these smart phones, we’re just creating one big, giant single point failure and making it SO much easier on the identity thieves.