Google Wallet is an initiative by Google to provide mobile payment services predominantly via Google's Android operating system. As I understand the system it will utilize primarily NFC to provide information from the customer device to the retailer.
On November 6th, many of the blogging websites (techcrunch.com, theverge.com) all reported a momentary information page relating to a physical card. It appears that this is to be an accessory for Android only devices. I'm not here to attempt to recreate the news. That is pointless as I have a full time career that will not allow me to compete with those. So I am going to move this to talk about my view point for this.
First, for full disclosure, I will be adding a post with my history of devices. This will give others an idea that I am a user. So right now I am on predominantly Apple user of devices. I am typing this up on a MacBook Air, have an iPhone 5, Windows Desktop (home built i5), work I utilize a Windows based Windows 7 laptop.
My ViewPoint:
When I first heard about this store on Tech News Today from the TWIT.TV podcast network I became excited. The opportunity to have a single credit card in my billfold that I could choose the actual back end credit card is a tremendous opportunity. Most of the time I would want to get most of my purchases to go to a single card. But there are times that I'd like to be able to have the card "morph" into my ATM card that I could pull cash out of the ATM with.
This would be an ideal situation to me. Some day this may become a reality with various cards having different rewards. There are plenty of retailers and other gas cards that this would be ideal for. So when you stop at a gas station, you utilize the card as the gas stations card. After that, you are on your way to a retail shop. You simply go into the new Google Wallet app and switch to the retailer card to get the benefits out of that card.
There are obviously a lot of components that Google would need to work on to get this completed. Google may want to keep this in Android only, however, Google could learn a lot about their users shopping habits. Creating an app for iPhone would be a good step in the right direction for this information as well. This may be a few years away, but I am looking forward to having only a couple of cards in my wallet.
