(Image courtesy of iPhone Buzz)
Sure, the iPhone 4 may be barely two months old by now, but that isn’t stopping some folks from looking ahead to what the next model may bring. With Apple’s recent hiring of a “near field communications” (NFC) expert, the future may be using your handset to pay for most everything.
Computerworld is reporting on the recent hiring of Benjamin Vigier to the Apple fold. According to their Apple Holic blog on Monday morning, Vigier is an expert in near field communications (NFC), which may someday soon enable your iDevice to essentially “be your wallet, your house keys, your identity, the centre of your mobile existence.”
Even before Vigier’s hiring, Apple has been hard at work filing a number of patents related to NFC technology. The recent hiring of an NFC expert is viewed as Cupertino stepping up those plans -- Vigier is the man behind both the PayPal Mobile service and Starbucks’ barcode-based mobile payment service.
Apple’s NFC patent portfolio includes filings for an airline ticketing and boarding pass application, a concert, entertainment and sports ticketing app and a host of mobile payment services. The company has even included names with some of the patents, such as iPay, iBuy and iCoupons, Products+ and even Grab & Go, a file transfer patent.
Cupertino apparently even has plans for how it might built NFC technology into a future handset, with a June, 2009 patent filing for a method of building a NFC antenna into a touch screen. See where we’re going with this?
“One day your phone will be your wallet,” Jonny Evans proclaimed in his Computerworld blog. “Is this a vision of a triumphant future, or a step into a plutocratic technology-driven hell?”
That remains to be seen, but with good old-fashioned cash continually on the way out and debit card ever on the rise, a cashless society appears closer than ever before. It’s not hard to imagine that your next iPhone might be part of the plan.
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esampson
September 07, 2010 at 9:31am
I am all for technological advances and finding ways to make our lives easier. My bank recently started letting its customers make mobile payments where we can pay bills and such through our smartphone which I find so helpful and easy. However I think that putting too much ease into one piece of technology could be a bigger problem for some of us then a help. I don't feel like it's smart to have one item be so valuable as to be your wallet, your keys, your identity etc. That's just asking for people to lose their phones and end up having lots of headaches over canceling things and also it could make it that much easier for people's identities to get stolen which no one needs in today's world!
