Showing posts with label cards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cards. Show all posts

​Apple teams with top credit cards for iPhone 6 payments, reports say

Even the Samsung Galaxy S3 allowed for mobile payments -- this one done at a McDonald's in the UK. Rich Trenholm/CNET

It's Labor Day weekend in the US, a time for barbecues, back-to-school shopping -- and iPhone rumors of course.

Recode on Sunday reported that American Express has agreed to "work together" with Apple on its new iPhone payment system, which is widely expected to be introduced with an iPhone 6 at Apple's September 9 event.

Citing unnamed sources familiar with the talks, Recode added that American Express is just one of several partners the iPhone maker needs to sign up before it launches the new mobile payments system. Sources told Recode that Apple has held discussion "with multiple credit card networks" about the new payment system. The Information previously reported that Visa had agreed to work with Apple, Recode noted.

Bloomberg followed with a report, also citing unnamed sources, that Apple is also partnering with Visa and MasterCard on the payment system, which would be enabled on the iPhone 6 by a short-distance wireless technology called near-field communication, or NFC. NFC, along with the Touch ID fingerprint recognition reader found on the most recent iPhone, will enable you to pay for items in a store with the touch of a finger.

Mobile payments, or the notion that you can pay for goods and services at the checkout with your smartphone, are poised to break into the mainstream if Apple and the iPhone 6 get it right.

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Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller declined to comment on the reports. We also contacted the credit card companies for confirmation. MasterCard declined to comment. We'll update this report if we hear back from the other two.

Wired was just the latest to report recently that the next iPhone would include mobile-payment capabilities powered by NFC. The technology and capability to pay with a tap of your mobile device has been around for years -- you can tap an NFC-enabled Samsung Galaxy S5 or NFC-enabled credit card at point-of-sale terminals found at many Walgreen drugstores in the US, for example -- but awareness and usage remain low.

Apple's visibility and massive user base - it already holds credit card data for about 800 million iTunes account holders -- could change that.

CNET's Roger Cheng contributed to this report.

Updated at 2:08 p.m. PT with Bloomberg's report about Visa and MasterCard also partnering with Apple. Also updated at 2:43 p.m. PT with Apple declining comment.

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Business cards grow a brain with SwivelCard

It's like an origami USB drive. SwivelCard

Most business cards end up in the recycle bin or tucked away in a drawer, discarded and forgotten. That's why there have been some creative attempts at making business cards more interesting, like the playable Tetris business card. The latest shot at a smart business card has appeared on Kickstarter in the form of the SwivelCard.

SwivelCard combines a printed USB drive with a normal business card. The card folds up to fit into a USB port and directs the recipient to open a Web page. That page can be changed after the fact, so you could hand a prospective client a business card that leads to your main website and then go in and have that particular card direct to a specific product page instead.

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The USB drive has less than 1 megabyte of storage and is read-only to prevent someone from changing the information on your card and handing it off to someone else. Each card has a unique ID. It appears on a user's computer like any other mass-storage USB drive. A QR code on the back lets users with mobile devices connect to the website without needing a USB port. Some of the cards also support NFC, depending on which pledge level you select.

It took less than eight hours for SwivelCard to hit its $10,000 goal and it's now over $40,000 in pledges with 29 days to go. You can test out the tech for a $29 pledge, which gets you 10 mini cards. There's no room for your contact information, but the cards can be redirected just like full-size SwivelCards. Moving up to the big cards will cost you $319 for a set of 200. The NFC-enabled cards run $379 for 200.

The team behind SwivelCard is working on improving an analytics component that can track cards as to their location and the times when the cards are used. The cards themselves are nifty enough to stand out from the crowd of normal, lifeless business cards, but the cost of buying them might make you think twice before handing them out to just anyone.

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