Smart Mobs: Payments by mobile phone

Smart Mobs: Payments by mobile phone:

"'Smart cards and mobile phones are quickly emerging as ways to pay with electronic cash,'this article in The Economist says.'Some of the hottest nightclubs have a new trick for checking the identity of their VIP guests: they send an entry pass in the form of a super barcode to their mobile phones. This is scanned by the large gentleman who lifts the velvet rope. Even those who must pay to get in may need their handsets: at a recent clubbers' night at London's Ministry of Sound, students were offered discounts if they used their mobile phones to buy electronic tickets.

Mobile phones are becoming an increasingly popular way to make all sorts of payments. In America fans of the Atlanta Hawks have been testing specially adapted Nokia handsets linked to their Visa cards to enter their local stadium and to buy refreshments. Elsewhere schemes are more advanced. You can already pass the day in Austria without carrying cash, credit or debit cards by paying for everything, including consumer goods, with a mobile phone, says Arthur D. Little, a firm of management consultants. It reckons worldwide payments using mobile phones will climb from just $3.2 billion in 2003 to more than $37 billion by 2008'. "