DownloadCastle

An interesting new development is a trial of new technology that, if successful will dramatically alter customer interaction and herald the dawn of the digital wallet. Telstra, NAB and Visa are trialing a contactless, mobile phone payments trial with a group of consumers and participating merchants at Edit .

The technology allows consumers participating in the trial to remotely download their NAB Visa credit card software application onto their Telstra mobile phone SIM card, enabling them to purchase goods and services by waving their mobile phone over a participating NAB merchant's reader.

Let's face it; the mobile phone is arguably one of the most promising new forms of payment applications in the world today. Globally, there are 3.3 billion mobile phones, outnumbering television sets (two billion), Visa cards (1.6 billion Visa branded cards on issue) and PCs (800 million)

The platform provides consumers with a consistent experience for all types of payments, regardless of phone type or geography, and is designed to work within the existing infrastructure established by mobile carriers and financial institutions. The technology supports the development of mobile payment solutions, such as contactless mobile (proximity) payments, mobile remote payments and person-to-person payments.

The platform also supports the development of payment-related services, such as account management, which enables consumers to monitor account activity through a mobile device, and mobile coupons that can be redeemed at the point of sale.

Could be the way of the future. I removed the name of the area where it is being trialed. TD

Definitely a promising technology to keep an eye on. For what it's worth, there's a bit of that over here (Korea for those who don't know where my current 'here' is) already. There are places where you can use your mobile to pay for snacks/drinks in vending machines, and there's even (in the Seoul metro area) a city wide government provided wifi internet system....yep, that's right...the entire city is a wifi hotspot! These guys are ON it when it comes to electronics innovation

One of the big citys over here is building a city wide hot spot. Can't remember what one.

It'd be nice to see something like that basically everywhere. As prevalent as computers and by extension, the internet, are in today's society it doesn't really make sense to not have some sort of infrastructure in place to make the internet available to the common citizen regardless of where they are in the city. Also considering that given advertising revenues for an ISP of that sort of massive scale, it shouldn't cost anything to actually use (though we all know that the greedy bastards in charge would try to make an extra buck off of it anyways).

The cost of setting it up and maintaining it is where it tends to fall down. It would be nice to not have to take a modem every where.

The question for me with the advertising is would it just be when you connect to the ISP or would it come up while pages loaded?

Another thing standing in the way of the idea is the prelavance of internet capable mobile phones. which are lowering the need for a city wide hot spot.