On Wed, 16 Jan 2002, Conrad Buck wrote:
> Out of interest, here in Canada we use a service called interact...
Just a minor correction: the service is actually called, if I
remember correctly, Interac (without a "t"), which is of course a
trademark of someone. Interac is actually the biggest of the "ATM
cross-use" networks (or whatever you call them) that let you withdraw
money from bank machines of banks other than your own. (There's
usually a small charge for this, around a dollar or so.) Similar
networks, such as Plus and Cirrus, exist in the U.S.
For all of these guys, moving to POS was a reasonable extension,
though I'm not sure how they make money at this. As they don't
charge the user, presumably they charge a fee to the merchant. (I
actually accepted Interac payments at a company I ran, so it's a
bit silly of me not to remember this, actually.)
Actually, though, this brings to mind another possible use for a
Keitai with Bluetooth: a simple keypad extension. There's really
not much point in supplying another keypad to enter a PIN for a
debit card payment when the user already has one. And in some
situations (such as in restaurants and taxis), it's a lot more
convenient for the user to use his own personal keypad. (Well, ok,
the restaurant example doesn't really apply in Japan, where you
rarely pay at your table.)
The problem, of course, is going to be key exchange. Here maybe is
where you want the barcode reader in your phone, too. The waiter
can bring over the bill, you swipe the barcode, and then pay.
(Although at that point the payment could just as easily be via
the WAN.)
Perhaps we need barcode readers in phones much more than we need
Bluetooth or infrared. Though I guess the waiter could carry around
a little infra-red "squirt gun" to transfer the data that way. But
that's more hardware: a barcode can easily be printed by current
equipment, and offers the security of making sure you know exactly
which bill is going into which phone.
A barcode reader would also be useful for CueCat-type functionality,
where you could just swipe the barcode in an advert and go directly
to that site, without having to type in a URL.
In fact, barcode+wireless was a project a friend and I started
doing some work on a couple of years ago in NYC. (Thus, the portable
scanning pen I bought to read barcodes.) One of the ideas was that
you could go into a bricks and mortar book or CD shop, find what
you wanted, scan the UPC, and it would come up with the cheapest
price on the Internet on your display. You could then walk over to
the manager, put your finger on the "buy" button, show him the
display, and say, "Sell me this at this price right now, or I press
this button and it's all over for you."
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Thu Jan 17 04:54:21 2002