Mobile Payments- When Will They Be The Mainstay?

On my way home today I heard an interesting story on NPR. It seems like men have been carrying around wallets and women have carried purses for a long time. With today's advancements and technology, more specifically mobile technology, I'm surprised that we have not been able to more fully utilize mobile payments. Today's smart phones have so much processing power and so much capability that we could easily and securely store the tiny amount of information that is stored on magnetic credit card slips.

Why is it that we can sit at home on the Internet and purchase just about anything we need or want with a few clicks of the mouse and have it delivered to her door, yet when we venture down to the corner gas station or supermarket we must carry a bulky wallet with credit cards, cash, and store loyalty cards. It seems to me that smart phones are so functional, as they now take pictures, play music, deliver and send e-mail, and so much more. Why couldn't we store our payment information on the phones as well and use them as a mechanism for paying for purchases on a mass scale?

It seems so impractical to carry a wallet, when we so often use only one thing and it. Maybe it's a credit card, a medical insurance card, or a store loyalty card. There are several application and hardware developers that are working on mobile payment options that will be secure, convenient, and easy to use.

One such company is Bling Nation, It utilizes a small sticker containing a microchip that is affixed to the back of a mobile phone. At stores that accept Bling Nation payments, you simply touch the tag on the back of the phone to a special terminal, and the money is then deducted from your account, and you are on your way.

Another recent pioneer in the area of mobile payments is Square. By utilizing a tiny device that plugs into the headphone jack of iPhones, users are able to accept credit card payments wherever they are. For instance, let's say you are splitting the cost of a meal with a friend. You plan on paying via credit card, as does your friend. If the restaurant did not split the check, what are you to do? With Square, you can swipe your friends credit card for the amount he or she is responsible for, and the money is deposited into your account, after a small transaction fee is deducted. You now can pay for the entire restaurant bill with your own credit card, having already been reimbursed for your friends portion. Pretty convenient.

What do you think the future holds for mobile payments? Do you ever foresee a time when all of our identity and financial information can be handled on mobile devices, and we will no longer need to carry identification cards, insurance cards, and credit cards?

The Government Always Gets A Cut

Finance and the condition of the economy in the US is on many peoples minds. As we look around us, the prices of things are rising. Gasoline, food, utilities, and entertainment costs have all gone up since the financial fallout of 2008.

In a recession, you usually see deflationary prices. The costs of items go down to stimulate economic activity, and get money flowing in the market. Other than interest rates, I can't really recall anything that has gone down in price. Can you?

Now, since prices are rising, and have been since the financial crumble we saw in late 2008, I would call that an inflationary economy. In my mind, the opposite of a recession. Yet, the government still says we are recovering from a recession, but are still in one more or less.

This now leads me to the topic of taxes. Everyone applauds the fact that their income taxes have gone down. 2011 will see the re-distribution of many of the Bush tax cuts that were to expire at the end of 2010. This redistribution includes a reduction in social security taxes.

Does this mean you will see more money in your paycheck? Indeed it does. However, we are funding the social security system less in the future than we did prior to 2011. The social security system already could not sustain itself on what people were paying in. How could reducing what gets put in be a good idea?

For those that will have passed on long before the social security system has a zero balance, they will enjoy the tax benefits now. For those of us that continue to pay social security taxes, and have since entering the workplace, we get to enjoy the benefit of the tax cut now, but will receive no benefit when it is tie for us in our later years.

I look around at how government agencies that are experiencing huge budget cuts are getting even more money out of us. Libraries raise their fees, park fees go up, and many things that were provided as free services now levy a charge.

In schools, we are offered cute products that showcase our children's work to purchase. Of course the school gets a cut from each product sold. I see this almost every week with notes home and other offers from my daughter's public elementary school.

Student pictures are now taken twice a year. They even send them home and let you see how nice they are. Hey, if you don't want to pay for them... just send them back. Of course parent's want to keep the pictures of their precious kids. The portrait studio gives the schools a kickback for each package sold.

As we head further into 2011, I hope the public gets more vocal in telling the government how their money should be spent. While we can enjoy the short-term benefits of a tax cut, we also must realize that the government is merely shifting how they will get our money.

If it isn't taxes, it is fees. It may even be a kickback from the t-shirt you buy featuring your kids school artwork.

What do you think? Are you sick of the smoke and mirrors?

Are You Drinking The Kool Aid?

Each year, many companies release their latest revisions of hardware and software and attempt to convince people to spend their hard earned money for new items and upgrades. It's fairly easy to identify the times of year companies will release their latest and greatest items, often at times optimized for back to school or holiday purchases.

To illustrate the scheduling expertise, we can look at a company like Apple. For the past year, in June or July, they release a new version of their incredibly successful iPhone. The timing is perfect for adoption of both the general public as well as ideal for capitalizing on the fact that college students return to campuses in late summer. The same is also true of their iPod products. After the back to school buying season, they seed their latest iPod models. This almost ensures these models will sell like hotcakes during the holiday shopping season.

I see nothing wrong with how Apple and many successful companies determine their product release schedules. In fact, Apple has done incredibly well at using the typical annual buying trends of consumers to their advantage.

One thing that has always bothered me about technology companies is how they try to tell us what we want. In the case of Apple, run by the visionary CEO Steve Jobs, they demonstrate technologies that they claim will forever improve our lifestyles.

With the latest iPhone 4 release, looking back at the keynote announcement address, a significant amount of attention was given to the Facetime feature they included with the new phone. This feature allows you to have a real-time audio and video call with another contact in your contact list as long as they are using the new iPhone 4. Steve Jobs went on and on about how revolutionary it was to have the videoconferencing capability in your phone.

I have happily been an iPhone4 user for 4 months. Other than the one time I tried out Facetime with a friend shortly after purchasing the phone, I have never used it. The online community and technical pundits are illustrating the same. People have tried it once or twice, seen that it is neat to use, and have not touched it again. Certainly, there may be a small portion of iPhone 4 users that use the Facetime feature regularly, but I'm thinking most users simply don't find the feature that revolutionary.

My point is that each year companies toss out the one feature that they feel consumers will most want in their products. More often than not, users will never use the new functionality, but still buy into the hype the new feature offers in making their purchase decisions.

The same is true for operating systems and other software. Take Windows 7, each revision of the Mac OS X operating system, and Microsoft Office. Each year, new versions of these products are released with several if not hundreds of new revolutionary or must-have features. Companies sell boatloads of new software packages, but usability surveys show that an incredibly small percentage of users actually embrace these additions.

How do you feel about how technology products are marketed? Do you find that more often than not you do not use most of the new features each product revision offers? Do products deliver on their promises? Will you continue to drink the Kool Aid?