At 04:34 PM 09/23/2002 -0700, James A. Donald wrote: >The biggest application of smart cards that I know of are >anonymous phone minutes.
They're also used for non-cellular phone minutes - Ladatel in Mexico is a big user, and I've worked with some British Telecom folks whose business cards are also 1-pound telephone smartcards. Supposedly Japan was a heavy user of the things for cheap vending machine payments. Another big usage is European satellite decoder keys; the low cost of smartcards is important because the codes keep getting cracked by commercial pirates. >Increasingly however, we see smartcard interfaces sold for PCs. >What for, I wonder? >Obviously end users are buying this stuff. What are they >buying smartcard readers for? I'm not convinced that the number of people selling them is closely related to the number of people buying; this could be another field like PKIs where the marketeers and cool business plans never succeeded at getting customers to use them. >Mondex, as far as I know, sank with very little trace. At least here in San Francisco, Mondex tried very very hard to find all the ways that smartcard payment systems could be user-friendly and not implement them. They didn't just shoot themselves in the foot, they went out looking for more feet to shoot at. A Starbucks two blocks from my office accepted Mondex as payments for coffee, which would seem to be ideal, especially since there was a Wells Fargo Bank branch two blocks from them with a big Mondex sign on the door. But you couldn't just walk into the bank, slap down some dead presidents, get your card, and go buy coffee. You walked up to the unmanned Mondex desk, which had paper forms and a phone that called some office that had somebody who would tell you how to fill out the forms and snail-mail them in to people along with your bank account information who would then snail-mail you your card, though once you'd done so I gather you could refill it easily. I don't remember if you had to have a Wells Fargo bank account to do it, or could get by with a Visa card instead - I think the former. I took my dead presidents down to a non-Starbucks for some regular joe.
