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Tuesday, June 11, 2002 |
Invisible Payments. Plugged In: Hong Kong Embraces the Octopus Card
"For years, the notion of a cashless society has been a futurist's dream deferred almost everywhere -- except, to some extent, in Hong Kong.
Here, just about everyone carries an Octopus card -- a rechargeable, contactless card that is passed over a scanner to access almost every train, bus or ferry. The territory's 6.75 million inhabitants make nearly seven million Octopus transactions each day, worth about HK$48 million (US$6.12 million).
And while cash remains king in this commercial hub, an increasing number of retail merchants, from Starbucks to fast-food chains and 7-Eleven, accept the Sony-made card. Still, getting around on the city's sprawling public transportation network accounts for over 90 percent of Octopus transactions....
The elegance of the Octopus card is its simplicity.
It does not require contact to be read. At rush hour, women can be seen passing entire handbags over scanners, also made by Sony, as they race through subway gates. It's almost as easy for men, who don't need to remove the card from their wallet.
Each microchip-embedded card contains an electronic purse.
Unless a holder chooses a personalized card, his or her identity is unknown.
According to Tai, the contactless system takes only 0.3 seconds to register a payment, compared with one or two seconds for a contact card, not counting insertion and extraction time. He said each card has a potential life span of roughly 10,000 transactions.
Card value can be replenished several ways, and every transaction is settled by the end of the day....
'We're not out there to get the larger payments market. We see ourselves as a micropayments operator,' said Tai.
The next frontier for Octopus is as a security device. Already, some 30,000-40,000 cards are used as main door access devices for residents of the housing estates where many Hong Kongers live." [Yahoo News, via Slashdot]
Check out the Future of Money article noted in the Slashdot write-up, too, because it provides a little more context and history.
I agree with Jakob Nielsen that we just haven't figured out how to implement micropayments on the web yet, but cell phone wallets and electronic cash cards make a lot of sense in today's world, too. Sure, I'll lose my card a couple of times, I have concerns about privacy, and there are whole segments of the population that, for various reasons, can't pre-pay a balance, but for a large demographic, this would be a godsend.
Hong Kong has become an early adopter because of a confluence of events, but it will happen here eventually. I love the idea of just walking through the turnstile to pay for my train ride (it'd be right up there with the I-Pass system we have on Illinois toll roads). I know some of the vendors in the library world that manufacture checkout systems are looking at technology that lets a patron check out titles just by walking out the door. I already use the self-checkout lanes at K-Mart... what will be next? [The Shifted Librarian]
9:13:54 AM 
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We'll Be So Over This Debate in a Year. Will the Blog Bubble Burst?
"Glenn says: 'Sure. But it'll be like most Internet bubbles: the real bubble is in attention. Napster got a lot of attention a couple of years ago. That bubble has 'burst,' but there's actually more filetrading going on now than there was then. It's just not on the cover of news magazines. Similarly, someone will soon announce that blogs are 'over,' but weblogging will continue at a higher rate than it's going on now. It will just have become part of normal life. We don't hear much about the 'electric light revolution' anymore, but that doesn't mean we've all returned to candles.' " [Scripting News] [The Shifted Librarian]
9:13:35 AM
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First K-logging, Now A-logging.
"Dave Winer and I have been talking about audio blogs and how to set them up so that publishing an audio post will be as simple as a written weblog post.
We both agree that the telephone is the obvious interface for this, but we need a service that handles the audio.
The hardest part is not sounding like an idiot when doing a solo-post. I can see interviews working much better.
Anyway, I gave it a shot at about 1:30am and couldn't get it into an mp3, but if you're interested, check out the .au Audio Blog Post (about 800k) let me know what you think." [Adam Curry's Weblog]
I was expecting the audio file to appear as an enclosure in my aggregator, so I was surprised I couldn't hear it right from there. And speaking of enclosures, I was going to email Adam and ask if I've been missing posts to his Fresh Free Music feed, because I only got the one enclosure for Bari Koral back in April, but I can't find his email address. I know Adam's a busy guy (understatement), so I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything! [The Shifted Librarian]
9:13:12 AM
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Fear of Lists.
"The Phobia List is exactly that: a list of phobias, in alphabetical order, from Ablutophobia (Fear of washing or bathing) to Zoophobia (Fear of animals). A few interesting fears in between include Zemmiphobia (Fear of the great mole rat), Syngenesophobia (Fear of relatives; there are specific words for fears of mother-in-law, stepmother, etc.), Pteronophobia (Fear of being tickled by feathers), and Liticaphobia (Fear of lawsuits)." [WPL: waterboro lib blog]
Interesting that there is no listing for "blogophobia." Yet. [The Shifted Librarian]
9:12:35 AM
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Gameboy Phones?.
Good Looking Games Go Mobile
"A British company is looking to woo mobile phone makers with technology it says can turn handsets into portable games consoles.
Cambridge-based TTPCom has developed software that significantly improves the graphic handling ability of a handset and makes it easy to translate games into a phone-friendly format.
The company said any handset maker or mobile operator adopting its software could attract new customers and generate more money from existing users who started playing and downloading games....
Danielle Jones, director of business development at TTPCom, said its engineers were prompted to develop the graphics software when they realised that the core of the chip powering Nintendo's Gameboy Advance was the same as found in 80% of the world's phones....
By the end of 2003 Dr Cronk predicted that people will see "incredible stuff" on the most expensive phones.
He said Arm has got Playstation 1 games such as Tomb Raider running on handset chips in its laboratory." [BBC News: Sci/Tech, via Lockergnome Bytes]
While it's true that you can already play somewhat decent games on some cell phones (in Europe and Asia, NOT in the U.S.), whichever company comes out with a Gameboy-quality smartphone will easily become a flagship product for Gen Xers (like me) and Net Gens (like my kids). This is going to be a huge market in the future. [The Shifted Librarian]
9:11:22 AM
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Speaking the Same Language?.
Volunteers Sought for Real-Time Web Translator
"Worldwide Lexicon prepares peer-to-peer network of online dictionaries, people to promote on-the-fly translation.
Imagine being able to communicate via instant messaging with people who don't speak your language, or translate a foreign-language news bulletin automatically when you open it in your browser.
These are just two of the applications envisioned by promoters of the Worldwide Lexicon, an all-volunteer project founded by Brian McConnell. His concept: a distributed computing architecture drawing on nodes of participating PCs--and people--around the globe. At its heart is a simple protocol that links Web-based dictionaries, encyclopedias, and translation servers. It can even query human translators via a Gnutella-like peer-to-peer network.
'The Internet has eliminated physical boundaries, but there are still language boundaries,' McConnell says, describing the project at the recent O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference. He proposes the Worldwide Lexicon as a simple, effective way to provide access to the wealth of language resources on the Web. Potential volunteers can inquire at the site, and the first components are expected to go live this summer. As WWL project leader, even McConnell is a volunteer; he is a cofounder and developer at Trekmail.com, a dictation service that enables customers to send e-mail by telephone....
The last piece of the puzzle is development of applications that let people access WWL servers for language translation in near-real time, according to McConnell and others on the project. By embedding hooks to WWL in instant messaging clients, for example, people could request automatic machine translations of incoming and outgoing messages. They could also request a translation of slang, metaphors, or other words not in the dictionary, by one of the volunteer client translators....
McConnell foresees the WWL will eventually automatically translate news reports and other topical information. Client translators could volunteer to work on small parts of long documents in a translation process called "segmentation." The separate translations are recombined automatically and output in HTML." [PC World]
This would be fantastic if McConnell can pull it off. One of the outcomes of blogging that I'm really looking forward to is reading blogs from ordinary people in other countries. I'm fascinated by the Middle East blogs, and as I've noted before, I think it would have been interesting to read Afghani blogs last year. (I understand all of the barriers to this, but I can still dream, so please don't flame me on this one.)
Here's a good example. I found Panjereh.blogspot.com in my referers starting a few days ago. I have no idea what any of it says, but I'm assuming that it's written in an Arabic language. The script on the page is beautiful, and I would use the WWL in a heartbeat to translate it if I could. [The Shifted Librarian]
9:09:37 AM
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Lou Josephs runs a weblog about media. He's based in washington, and reports rumours of Bob Pittman replacing Disney ceo Michael Eisner. What the heck is going on behind the scenes in the entertainment industry? If there really is a coup d'etas at Disney, it would certainly mean big trouble for some of the company's assets, like say, the ABC Television Network.
I agree with Steve MacLaughlin, "It's all gonna come crashing down." I doubt accounting irregualrities, greed and lies are exclusive to the oil and telecoms business. Anderson did the books for plenty of media companies.
In case hollywood hasn't noticed yet, the internet's distribution capabilities aren't your biggest worry, right now email, weblogs and mobile phones are unearthing all your secrets and writing the screenplay to BigMedia's demise.
I think we'll witness one more sickening drop on the markets and some true panic as some Bigs fom other industries keel over.
These are of course, the best of times to start new ventures based on infrastructure left in the ashes. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
9:07:22 AM
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Industry pundit John Dvorak points out how satellite radio may be over before it's begun: I point to this article because of the recent brou-ha-ha over the satellite digital radio companies' attempt to get the FCC to rejigger nearby spectrum neighbors' rules. Dvorak points out the weaknesses in the current generation of satellite radio, and it's a clearly high hurdle to overcome. Instead of satellite radio, how about low-bandwidth (plain 802.11) spread along the highways and commuting corridors, letting you listen to 30 kbps multicast signals from dozens of stations? [80211b News]
9:52:08 AM
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I think the real estate market is gonna come crashing down. I think the music industry is gonna come crashing down. I think the professional sports television contracts boondoggle is gonna come crashing down. I think the airline industry and telecom are gonna come crashing down. I think higher-education is gonna come crashing down. I think network news is gonna come crashing down. Today's way of doing business is not sustainable.
| Coincidence?  [Doc Searls Weblog]
9:47:55 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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