Interesting technology - Credit Cards
Very interesting idea for those with multiple credit and bank cards...
Wired magazine had an
article about
Chameleon Network who make a product called Pocket Vault.
When you start, you upload all of your credit cards into Pocket Vault (it has a mag-stripe reader), Pocket Vault then shows an icon of each card on its touchscreen. When you want to make a purchase, you use your fingerprint to turn it on, you select which card you want to use and it transfers the proper data to the Pocket Vault's own smart card. You then use the smart card as you would the original credit card. A cool feature is that the smart card will deactivate in ten minutes so if you forget it, a thief will not be able to use it for very long.
It is priced at $200 which is a bit high for the average consumer but it is a very cool piece of technology and I can certainly see getting it if it falls to around $80 or so.
Posted by DaveH at March 5, 2004 9:50 AM