The Visa credit card outfit has certainly got the retail scene abuzz with news it will launch a "digital wallet" in Australia by Christmas. The e-wallet, dubbed V.me, will henceforth store all your cards in digital form, probably on your mobile phone.
Henceforth, some folk have suggested, there'll be no need to carry a leather wallet at all.
Don't believe it. DoubleClick's present undigital wallet contains about 18 cards, only three of which are of the credit or debit variety.
There are shopping rewards cards, a union card, three club membership cards, a health insurance card, a Medicare card, a driver's licence, a motoring association card, a Lotto player's card, a library card, assorted business cards and probably several others that we have forgotten.
Will they all be digitised and transferred to our forthcoming e-wallet? Somehow, we doubt it. Visa is understandably interested only in electronic payments from which it can earn a healthy cut.
You'll still need to carry a credit or debit card for use in places not connected to the V.me system.
As of last week, that was just about everywhere. The only retail outlets Visa's publicity material mentions as signed up are JB Hi-Fi, Cotton On, City Beach and Lorna Jane. Presumably, others will sign on in coming months.
Four of the five major banks through which all those electronic funds must flow, and which presumably will also help themselves to a cut, had agreed to join up last week. ANZ, NAB, and Westpac/St George were on-side, but Commonwealth Bank was humming and hawing. Perhaps the jumbo is considering its own e-wallet scheme.
Visa's V.me is in fact aimed more at online transactions than in-store purchases. Once you find what you want online, you "simply and securely pay online by entering a single username and password, eliminating the hassle of entering personal details across multiple merchant websites," the card company says.
Well, fair enough, though there are a few outfits, including Amazon.com and PayPal, already offering that kind of service.
Several outfits have been experimenting with the idea of using a smartphone equipped with a near-field communications (NFC) chip as an e-wallet. Just wave your mobile at an electronic terminal in your favourite supermart or betting shop and the checkout is done, they say.
There are problems galore with that idea. One is persuading the stores to shell out for new NFC terminals.
Some fear a too-careless wave in a crammed checkout may have you paying for a neighbouring shopper's goods as well as your own.
DoubleClick reckons fumbling in trouser pockets or handbag for a smartphone while balancing a shopping basket or trundling a trolley could be considerably worse than fumbling for the old leather wallet or purse.
And there are privacy concerns: "These types of transactions allow for a lot more data to be transferred than the traditional credit card transaction," warns Justin Brookman, a US privacy advocate.
Forrester Research, a US-based outfit, recently did a survey that found 69 per cent of American adults are simply not interested in using a mobile device to pay in a store. It's probably much the same in Australia.
As a Forrester analyst put it: "Our current way of paying is really quite convenient." Swiping a credit card takes mere seconds especially with the new Pay-Wave or tap-and-run cards.
And credit cards and cash never run out of batteries.
Apple eyes SD slot
APPLE is frequently criticised for not providing a slot for an SD memory card on its iPad tablets or on its most basic MacBook Air lightweight laptop.
Many makers of tablets powered by Google's Android operating system do provide such a slot, and it can make quite a difference, especially on lower-priced models that don't come with a great deal of internal storage.
Most top brand name Android tablets come with at least 16 gigabytes of memory to hold your music, photos, videos, e-books, email and other stuff. Avid users prefer to have 32 or 64GBs.
But increasing numbers of lower-priced tablets are creeping on to the market with only 8 gigs or even less. The Bauhn 10.1-inch tablet, for instance, which is sold at Aldi supermarkets for $249, sports a meagre 4GB of inbuilt storage; the basic model of Hewlett-Packard's recently released Slate has 8GB.
That doesn't matter much if the tablet has an SD slot - and both those models do. Just plug in an 8GB card costing perhaps $8-$10, and you've at least doubled your storage. (Aldi's Bauhn actually comes with a 16GB mini-SD card, enabling Aldi to claim the device has 20GB of available memory).
So far not one of Apple's iPads sports an SD slot. The most basic iPad, the iPad Mini at $369, comes with 16GB of built-in memory, and no way of adding more.
The super-thin MacBook Air in basic trim comes with just 128GB of internal solid-state memory. That would be a lot on a tablet, but it's barely enough on a laptop. There is an SD card slot on the top-end model, which has a 13.3-inch display. But there's no such provision on the smaller and cheaper 11-inch version. Making room for it will require a bigger, fatter, device, Apple argues.
However, a change could be in the air. In late June, Apple applied for a patent for a slender new combination slot that would accommodate both a USB plug and an SD card. The patent has yet to be granted, but many observers are speculating that new iPads and 11-inch MacBook Airs with the combo slot could be in the works.
A combo slot could also turn up in future iPhones and perhaps even form part of the long-rumoured iWatch. Minimalist-minded Apple design chief Jonathan Ive would be able to pack more into these devices, yet hopefully keep them elegantly thin.
