Awesome New Product Could Kick NFC In The Nuts

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By David Ponce

A lot of money is being poured into electronic wallets and integration of near field communications into cellphones. Google Wallet is one example of one company investing large sums into the kind of project that, while ambitious, may take a while to take off. See, the problem with NFC is that it requires a point of sale hardware update, so that you’re actually physically able to pay by waving your phone around. Think about that for a minute. How many mom and pop shops will buy in? How long will it take to spread to the millions of businesses out there? How fragmented will the marketplace be? Credit card acceptance, on the other hand, is already pretty widespread. The Geode from iCache knows this and brings a universal wallet you can actually use, in a couple months, pretty much anywhere credit cards are accepted. NFC just became useless. Hit the break to find out how it works.

The Geode is a very special iPhone case with a detachable credit card. But this card is not like the one in your wallet right now. Its magnetic stripe can be changed on the fly. So the idea is that you load everything, all your credit cards, all your loyalty cards, everything into the related application. And when you want to pay, open the app, select your card and just use it! Want to use a loyalty card without a magnetic strip? No problem, a small LCD will display that card’s barcode when necessary! There’s even a fingerprint reader on the case to make sure only you can do this, and not anyone else. It’s just brilliant.

The project is currently on Kickstarter and of course is fully funded. Regular retail price for the Geode is $199 but the company put 4,000 units up for pre-order on Kickstarter at $159. As of writing, there were still 3,802 available. Shipping should come in late May or June of this year.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ Techcrunch Gadgets ]

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