Hasta La Gadget!

When tax expert Bob McIntyre’s daughter bought a cellphone for $25, he was surprised to learn she ended up paying almost $60 in total, once taxes were added in. What followed was his adventures into the messy world of the government’s cellphone taxing scheme, which is calculated based on the original sticker-price of a phone, and not the post-rebate and discount price. More »

Visit a Starbucks and you can now forget about cash or cards: Just flash your phone to pay.

Starting today, iPhone, iPod Touch and Blackberry users will be able to pay for coffee and coffee-themed products in 6,800 of Starbucks’ own stores and in 1,000 Starbucks outlets in Target stores. The scheme has been tested since last year in a handful of stores, and is now available nationwide.

The app doesn’t bother with complex in-store machinery or NFC or RFID chips in the phones, for obvious reasons. (Sorry, Nexus S users.) Instead, you just tap the number of your Starbucks Card into a free app and load the app up with funds from either your credit card or, for iPhone users, PayPal. When you’re ready to pay, your phone displays a QR code on screen, and the barista can scan it using a standard reader.

In effect, it makes your smartphone into a virtual version of your Starbucks card, saving you from carrying around another piece of plastic and giving you the ability to see your balance and add funds as necessary.

Apart from convenience to you, the customer, using a phone to pay should speed up the lines in-store. Especially as most of the people in front of me are already jabbering on their phones instead of actually paying any attention to the staff at the counter. Then again, maybe hunting for the Starbucks icon on your home screen will becom the new hunting for change in your wallet.

Mobile Payment Debuts Nationally at Starbucks [Starbucks]

Starbucks Card Mobile App for iPhone [Starbucks]

Starbucks Card Mobile App for BlackBerry [Starbucks]

Counting dollars and cents on the checkout counter really makes you feel the weight of every expenditure. Swiping a credit card or waving an NFC device over a sensor? Not so much. Enter the Proverbial Wallets from the Information Ecology group at the MIT Media Lab, three separate devices that use three haptic techniques to curtail your spending. First is the Bumblebee, which buzzes and vibrates whenever money comes into or goes out from your account. Next is Mother Bear, which becomes harder to open as you get closer to your spending goal. Finally is Peacock, which swells proudly as your bank balance does the same. Sadly none of these are actually available yet, but we have a feeling if they were they might put a bit of a hurting on our very real and very strict budgets.

Proverbial Wallets make your metaphysical money a little more tangible originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Dec 2010 08:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A proof-of-concept vending machine shows how we can dispense with cash for everyday purchases, skipping credit and debit cards altogether and going straight to electronic transfer.

The vending machine uses QR codes, PayPal, a smartphone camera and Twitter. And, to complete the geek-buzzword bingo checklist, the hardware is based in part on Arduino, an open source hardware platform.

“We’re experimenting with ways of taking PayPal payments beyond the web,” PayPal Labs’ Ray Tanaka said. At the PayPal X Innovate 2010 developers’ conference, he showed off a gumball machine that lets people use their smartphone to scan a barcode instead of fishing for change.

Tanaka and his team put together their gumball machine using an ordinary mechanical vending machine, an Arduino processor, a WiShield and a few other smartly chosen basic parts.

Scanning the QR barcode sets the gumball machine in motion. Then the customer gets a Twitter notification that their PayPal payment has gone through and how much they’ve been charged. On the merchant side, Tanaka showed off an instant payment-notification system using an LCD display.

Candy is cute and “gives good demo” (as Steve Jobs puts it), but I can easily imagine 101 even better uses for a simple electronic payment system like this where cash is short and speed is essential. Here’s a short list to get you started:

• parking garages
• public transit
• toll booths
• grocery checkout
• gas stations

In short, anywhere you need to be on the move and would rather not whip out your wallet.

Story via the Arduino Blog and Helablog.

Follow us for real-time tech news and ideas: Tim Carmody and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

See Also:

• Will the Internet of Things Be Open or Closed?
• Spime Watch: Shipping Containers and the Future Internet of Things …
• Laser Etched QR Codes: Digital Graffiti For Gadgets
• Amazon iPhone App Adds Barcode Scanning
• Belly Up to the Bar Code

Afghanistan’s vibrant cellphone ecosystem is one of the country’s economic bright spots. There are about 12.5 million cellular subscriptions in the country of 27 million people.

Jan Chipchase, executive creative director at Frog Design spent some time in Afghanistan recently for a research study on mobile banking.

In Afghanistan most cellphone users have pre-paid mobile accounts but not ATM cards (only 3 percent of the country has bank accounts) so mobile banking will take the form of SIM cards that are pre-loaded with credit and distributed to re-sellers. But that presents some major challenges. In most other countries, transporting the SIM cards and securing them would be a simple matter. That’s not the case in a war-torn environment not known for its safety, says Chipchase.

For some challenges though, there are unique local solutions. Since many users have mobile phones but no access to electricity, battery charging stalls (shown in the photo below) have popped up in cities like Mazar-e-Sharif. One hour’s battery charging costs 10 Afghanis or 0.2 cents. A stall carries a variety of chargers to suit different phones. To charge the phone, a user is given a number tag and the same number is attached to the battery and the phone. It’s a system similar to how valets keep track of the keys of a parked car.

CD players and boom boxes are sold by the roadside in cities but music is clearly moving towards mobile, says Chipchase. There are a number of “corner-shop app stores,” he says, that offer side-load ringtones, applications and movies on mobile phones.

A mobile-charging stall in Mazar-e-Sharif carries a number of battery chargers.

A 20-year-old Sony calculator wrapped by a carpenter-made casing and still in use by its one owner — a Mazar-e-Sharif cloth trader.

All photos courtesy: Jan Chipchase/Frog Design