According to the Wall Street Journal, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are embarking on a venture that will allow mobile phone users to pay for goods and services using their cell phones. The project has been called Isis and will allow a person to wave their phone in front of a scanner in order to pay for an item. All three major wireless companies will be working together.
The venture will utilize near-field communications technology, also called NFC. NFC is already found in cards used at drugstore chains and gas stations to get discounts. The NFC chips transmit signals short distances and will enable customers to make these payments via cell phone. Currently, companies use NFC stickers or chips that are inserted into the phone but beginning next year, for example, RIM will begin integrating the technology directly into their BlackBerry phones. Other companies plan to use this technology as well. The Chief Executive of Google Inc. recently showed off a prototype of a phone utilizing both an Android operating system and an integrated NFC chip. The Isis will use Discover Financial Services' payment network and came about as major credit card companies such as Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. began to push their mobile payment initiatives.
The link between wireless companies and credit payments will be very interesting. The amount of competition that credit card companies will see is going to be immense because cell phone payments will be so convenient for many consumers. As of 2009, 91.3% of the population had wireless subscriptions. People are becoming so dependent on cell phones that this will simply add one more reason to always carry a cell phone. It's arguable whether this is a good thing. Yes, it will be more convenient, but it is just a way for these big cell phone companies to create growth increase revenue.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704312504575618451794204436.html?KEYWORDS=telecommunications
ReplyDeleteI think that this new system that those companies are trying to develop is very usefull and handy. Moreover this just serves as proof that the telecom industry is trying to get involved into all the industries they possibly can. A few posts before I talked about the mobile carriers developing softwares and gadjets for their devices for facilitating the connections between the users and their doctors or pharmaceutical companies any time of the day. They are getting involved in things that you will never imagine they could, now as you showed us, into banking. The telecom industry with this new technologies and gadgets is very unlikely to show declining trends in the following years and specially in this times where people are starting to notice that they are going to do all the things they want through a single device, their cell phones.
ReplyDeleteThese technologies have been in place overseas for years and it is good to see the US telecom market finally getting involved in implementing these new technologies. This also reflects how quickly nearly everything in our society is becoming digital. Many have questioned this movement, as it often seems like fraud and scams are much more easily executed over the Internet. There has also been the rise of identity theft as more private information is shared digitally. Of course, greater privacy and security features have been put in place to combat this, but consumers likely will still question how well they are being protected. If companies are able to convince them that their identities and bank accounts will be kept safe and secure, this new technology will likely be hugely successful.
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