To good to be true.
Plastc Card
351–356 of 356 posts
Re: Plastc Card
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
You really believe you can fit an eink display, a touch screen digitizer, a microcontroller, bluetooth and nfc on a card that thin and sell it for 155 dollars?
Yes. If the eInk screen uses the card plastic in place of the glass which usually backs such a screen, it can easily be thin enough for a credit card form factor. Touch screen digitizing can be done resistively with overlaid wires over the screen. Their touch interface doesn't have to be super accurate, you only seem to touch in a few distinct locations. A microcontroller is already inside every chip and pin card on…
These cards do not run Java, but CardJava. Yes the syntax may look similar at first glance, but it's a completely different beast with huge limitations.
Then - an antenna for bluetooth, NFC and for wireless charging? Combine those and you'll have issues. NFC requires a very small amount of 'wireless power'. Charging a battery requires a more serious amount. Having fried more than one NFC card here at work, I know how tricky it is to work with wireless tech. Good luck managing that.
There is no way this technology exists in the form-factor they're presenting or require. The dynamic magnetic stripe sure is possible, but not that small. You also seriously underestimate the cost of all this. For this to work, they need their own silicon - no way around that fact - which is very expensive, certainly because this is clearly not a product that many people will actually order. But from your pov, "just some more silicon" seems to be a walk in the park. I'm not aware of any e-ink displays avaiable with touch like they presented there. That would by the way need another separate controller. Oh look - more silicon!
This entire picture is not just a "couple bucks". It contains technology you find in current phones at an even smaller scale, with a much smaller target audience. Really - who is going to pay 155 bucks simply to have a plastic card?
To me it all looks like someone dreamed up an utopian payment solution for the US market and built a scam from it. It uses seriously outdated magnetic stripes which is irrelevant to most part of the world, and by the time it would actually be possible to make a stripped down version of this, hopefully NFC/EMV will have replaced this insecure mess and everybody will be paying with their phone.
Anyway - keep an eye on Cartes on 4-6 November - which is THE fair for payment related technologies. If it's not there, it doesn't exist.
Re: Plastc Card
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I should never use a debit card for anything anyway. You have awful fraud protection and zero to near-zero rewards. Banks will give you net-30 terms for no cost, reward you with many benefits, and give you fantastic protection from thieves AND retailers.
The big problem with debit cards is if you get it stolen then your money is taken. Sure you'd get it back eventually, but until them you don't have access to your own money and can't spend it.
That's weird. I live in a country where 95+% of all payments are done with debit cards, and I don't know anyone who ever had a problem with fraud.
Maybe debit cards are a bit better at security than "oh let's copy this number and put a fake signature on a piece of paper"? Even the mag-stripe version of our payment system that we have had here since '79 required online PIN verification.
Re: Plastc Card
#354Hmm, I thought this might be what Coin turned into but I see that onlycoin.com is still taking pre-orders for their all-in-one card. I get the consumer appeal but find the appeal for the banks less strong. I would love a one time credit card app where every time you swiped it, it changed numbers. And it seems making the card 'smart' like this could enable that sort of thing.
I met with one of the Coin founders and he had something really interesting to say on this topic. If apple-pay is successful it will disintermediate the banks from the money process/transaction. They are clearly not wanting this to happen and so are happy with things like plstc and coin.
Re: Plastc Card
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it's an American thing. In the US every retail entity that you interact with will offer you discounts to scan a plastic card in addition to your credit card (it allows them to trend you as a consistent customer for their data modeling, send you targeted advertising, and so on). If you want to take advantage of these discounts, you build a significant stack of plastic.
As a question, what kind of percentage discount are you getting for this data exchange?
I'd guess on the order of 10%.
At a grocery store, selected items are discounted (usually to half off). At a restaurant, you might get every tenth meal free.
Re: Plastc Card
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gift card for restaurants? It's that seriously a thing? What message are you supposed to get when you receive one, "I would like to offer you dinner but can't spare one hour to eat it with you"?
You've never heard of a raffle prize or a grab gift?
Never before today no