
PayPal brings NFC money transfers to Android, starting with Nexus S - jamesjyu
http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/13/paypal-android-nfc/
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kgrin
Not quite _ironic_ , but interesting: IIRC from Founders at Work, mobile
payments was PayPal's first focus - it was only when that didn't really pan
out that they said "hey, maybe web payments can be a thing too!" Fun to see it
come around full circle...

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wmf
That's why "this has failed before" isn't a good heuristic; a lot of ideas
that failed in previous decades are now viable due to changes in technology or
society.

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cullenking
A friend of mine was involved with the dev process. Apparently, bump is a
major PITA on Android, as in, works terribly.

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wcoenen
This is pretty vague. Do you mean that they had trouble interpreting the
accelerometer data to detect bumps?

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cullenking
The success rate during their dev process was around 5%. Read the reviews in
the android market - the one with people saying "only connected once out of at
least 20 tries" are just about spot on.

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zmmmmm
I wonder how hard it would be to turn this into a POS technology? Seems like
if you just taped a Nexus S to the counter it would be almost there and you
would be doing direct PayPal transactions with your customers.

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wmf
I suspect Mastercard PayPass has lower fees than PayPal. (With the usual
caveat of higher upfront.)

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rdl
Yeah, the current best system is to buy a ViVOtech NFC/RFID reader for your
existing POS and just use PayPass. (disclaimer: I worked for ViVO back in 2003
on NFC security stuff).

Integration costs with the POS are probably a bigger cost than anything else
for most merchants.

What IMO has largely doomed this technology, except for transit, tolls, etc.,
is the change to card association policy where now you don't need to sign for
magstripe transactions under a certain amount. The purpose behind NFC vs.
stripe+sign was always to speed up the checkout, and the printed receipt (or
pad) and signature is the slow part.

For tolls, you still want something beefier RF-wise than the normal NFC,
because you need to work through glass and steel. Transit is usually a
declining-balance purse system, not realtime credit card, and is a single
closed app.

And of course the big chicken and egg problem of readers vs. cards (and user
awareness).

Loyalty might be a better app for NFC than payment (especially for the kind of
things where you don't make a financial transaction, similar to checkins at
venues), but QR codes might work just as well there, or GPS + smartphone app.

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wmf
Is NFC not treated the same as a swipe? It should be (slightly) more secure
since the cloning equipment is scarcer.

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rdl
Very similar to swipe, but with different back office processing and limits.
It is better security in some ways so they were willing to allow no signature
transactions. It still hasnt taken off in the USA, but check out jack in the
box drivethrough and such for the readers.

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wmf
Oh, I thought you were saying that you have to sign for NFC but not for swipe
transactions. It makes more sense that you don't have to sign for either.

