(September 21, 2011)
Are you sick of carrying your bulky wallet with all your credit cards? Google has entered a new market to help solve that problem, welcome to Google Wallet. Google Wallet rolled out on Sept. 19th, 2011 and is designed to utilize select cell phone’s short distance wireless or near field communications (NFC). Once the owner has the application they simply tap their phone against a NFC-enabled cash register and pay for their goods.
Google Wallet is definitely the first big roll out of its kind however several other companies backed by AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile will be following suit in 2012. Google Wallet is backed by Visa, American Express, Citi, Discover and MasterCard.
Currently, there are only a limited number of establishments that support NFC, however if Wallet takes off then we could be seeing a lot more of this type of technology. One challenge this technology has is that consumers may not embrace it for security reasons or simply an unwillingness to abandon the plastic cards they are used to. The only phone that currently supports Wallet is the Nexus 4G because it comes enabled with a special NFC chip that securely stores the credit card numbers.
