MasterCard's PayPass RFID Payment
If I glue a piece of pizza to a Samsung handset, can I announce the first PizzaPhone? That’s kinda what Mastercard has done with their PayPass technology. MasterCard has taken a cool RFID payment solution, which allows people to pay for things by waving their RFID chip in front of a reader, and fudged it into a claimed “mobile” payment scheme by gluing it to a phone casing. Yawn. By that token, my credit cards have been mobile for years, and I have used a futuristic “mobile payment system” wallet to carry them. Seriously, kudos to MC for the RFID system, but it has nothing to do with the cellphone. You cannot use it through the cellular network, nor can you use the phone’s bluetooth or IR capabilities. MC does have a stored value aspect to the RFID, which can be recharged by using a phone, but this is done by the user not the chip.
