whose line is it anyway?

I got my first wallet when I was about seven years old and still can remember how kids judged each other for how much (useless) stuff you had in your wallet, but with the pass of the time my wallet has been shrinking, now I’m quite sure it will disappear at some point in the eight to ten years, been replaced by an smartphone. I might keep a wallet, but just as a physical backup of my digital one. But let’s check how far we are from a complete digital wallet based on what you have in your wallet right now:

Pictures: Already checked, all smartphones and most of ‘dumb-phones’ can store pictures of your SO, babies and lolcats.

Cash: This might be most harder item to digitalize, some ideas for digital cash are on the table like Bitcoin, but we will need years of legal and financial discussions before see these type currencies going mainstream.

Credit -Debit Cards: Most of the US banks already have a mobile app, which can be potentiated with NFC technologies to act as banking cards, also services like Square, Paypal, Venmo , Serve and Google Wallet are available and can provide an alternative to plastic, we will need to wait for the commerce to start adopting such services.

Driver Licenses:  I would love to see digital driver licenses around, but I couldn’t find any state or federal initiative towards this idea, again NFC and Bluetooth technologies could help this to happen.  Meanwhile keep your driver license in a money clip with your cash.

Other Ids:  Student IDs, library cards and other forms of identification might be easier to implement by particular entities and might help to push for driver licenses and other official identifications.

Commuting cards: Depending on your city, this can be a couple of years away or a couple of decades away. For the MTA case (New York City) some stations are equipped with PayPass sensors to accept credit card payments. But moving this idea to the mobile space might require a considerable infrastructure investment. but if already works with E-Z Pass to pay tolls why it can’t be developed for trains and buses?

Business cards: We do love well-designed business cards, right? But they got outdated pretty easy and are difficult to organize.The digital wallet is a good place for them, right now we can use at least three services for digital business cards: Bump, Hashable and LinkedIn app.

In conclusion, wallets would be endangered as the NFC technologies blossom and government agencies move forward to digital services.  I hope my wallet can soon rest in peace next to my wristband watch also retired for my smartphone a year ago.

… and please forgive my grammar.

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