Wireless service providers and finance companies are now looking to turn wireless phones into wireless wallets. Companies such as Motorola and MasterCard have announced a field test of wireless phones equipped with chips allowing users to swipe the phones to pay for products. According to a USA Today report, the advantages of using a wireless phone "wallet" will be the speed and convenience of not having to pull out cash or credit cards. (Source: USA Today)
Wallets have been a focus of attention lately in studies done at IIT by Christina Nippert-Eng and Jay Melican, studies underway at Intel Research in the PaPR group, studies at France Telecom under the guidance of Christian Licoppe... These studies have been looking at wallets as repositories of modalities of access, identification, memory, self. They embody the contradictions of public and private, containing the most private information that is often displayed in public. I wonder though, whether Motorola and MasterCard had considered these issues of public and private, the repository of status and access, the symbology of a wallet when they considered making a "wireless" wallet out of a phone. No, really, it's not about giving the phone the capability of making wireless transactions (although this does raise issues of security in data transfer and costs). It's about calling it a "wireless wallet". Because it's not quite there yet... and I wonder if it will ever be (although it's on the way, certainly). the phone itself is a physical object that can interact, produce, inspire and contain. Curious, where this is going to go... e-wallets have been a fantasy of big tech companies for a while now... as always, the next big thing...
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