Mobile payment systems are finally gaining traction among major vendors. While NFC, the popular tap-to-pay system is still in its initial stages, it seems that Isis, a kind of mobile wallet, is finally becoming a reality. Isis is finally expected to arrive in September.
The carriers that are officially supporting Isis include AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. In fact, these three vendors already launched the service back in April 2011 but it failed to kick off. The original plan is to have Isis fully functional by the first half of 2012.
Apparently, those plans had to face a delay. Security concerns were raised about the safety of the transactions of Isis and the wireless vendors had to tweak the system quite a bit. The changes included handing over the task of transactions processing to credit-card operations, something which was initially planned to be carried out by the carriers.
The plan is to roll out Isis to the cities of Salt Lake City and Austin, initially. The limited launch will allow the carriers gauge the practical feasibility of the system and see if there is further room for improvement. We can then expect Isis to be deployed on a larger scale over time if no glitches crop up in the meantime.
NFC is also slowly gaining traction. A number of hardware vendors have already jumped the NFC-bandwagon and we can expect large-scale use of NFC to start within a few months.
Courtesy: PC World
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