Amid all the current Android related news, Visa announced that it was developing a suite of potentially handy apps for Google’s mobile operating system:
The services will allow Visa cardholders to receive notifications to their mobile devices about transaction activity on their accounts; obtain offers from a wide array of merchants; and use the built-in location-based technology developed by Google to swiftly map nearby merchants where they can redeem Visa offers and locate ATMs that accept Visa.
All that could be helpful, though it could be annoying if it’s blatant advertising.
But Visa hopes to go way beyond GPS-driven coupon delivery and get into payment-by-cellphone.
Actually, a lot of companies want to do pretty much the same thing: tie cellphones to credit cards and grant people to pay for things by waiving phones at cash registers.
I’m not against this technology, but I don’t really see the point. Is it really easier to waive a cellphone than waive an actual credit card?
Perhaps sometime — years from now — we might be able to tie everything to our cellphones: credit cards, driver’s licenses, library cards, frequent shopper cards, everything.
Then we could just leave our wallets at home. Automobile keys could also go in the mix.
But that’s a long ways off. Imagine how hard would it be to get everyone to agree to a single standard that worked for everything.
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