Source: Eliot Van Buskirk | WIRED
Mobile payment is fast becoming a red-hot sector. A Recent entry is Square, from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, which allows small businesses to accept credit card payments using an iPhone. Meanwhile, eBay’s Paypal allows customers to pay in stores using a simple smartphone app — no chip required.
Now DeviceFidelity has partnered with Visa to provide mobile payments using an iPhone app and a special case with a microSD payment card inside it (photo courtesy of DeviceFidelity).
A battle is heating up over the right to process payments when you wave your cellphone over a sensor to buy goods at a local merchant. Visa made waves this week by announcing a collaboration with DeviceFidelity, which makes an iPhone case called In2Pay with a near-field communications microSD card embedded in it that will allow iPhone users — whose devices lack a microSD card — to get in on the action.
To pay at any of Visa’s swipe-free payWave payment terminals, already found at over 32,000 retailers nationwide, all you would need to do is tap an app in your DeviceFidelity-encased 3G or 3GS iPhone and wave it over the terminal. Retailers like the system because it saves them time on each transaction, according to Visa.
Apparently, swiping a credit or debit card simply takes too long.