No Cards, No Cash. Just a Phone.

Plenty of companies would love to get their hands on our wallets. But Google wants to go one step further: it wants to be our wallets.

Its new phone software, called Google Wallet, is intended to replace the credit cards in our actual wallets.
It does sound pretty spectacular, doesn’t it? No fishing plastic cards out of wallets, no paper slips, no signatures. Everything is handled securely, instantly, conveniently, with one tap of your phone at the register.
Europeans and Asians already routinely pay for things that way. Why can’t we have that in America?
Now you can. But there are enough footnotes to fill a podiatry journal.
At the moment, the free Google Wallet app runs on only a single cellphone model: Sprint’s Google Nexus S, which runs Google’s Android software. That’s because Google Wallet requires a special N.F.C. chip (near-field communications), and the Nexus S is one of the few phones so equipped.
Someday, Google says, many more phones will have N.F.C. chips. The company says that it’s in talks with every major Android phone maker.
The next question: Where can you use Wallet to pay for things? Google had the inspired idea of teaming up with MasterCard, which has already installed N.F.C. readers at 150,000 merchants in the United States and 230,000 overseas. You can see the black MasterCard PayPass terminals all over the place.
That’s 150,000 companies; the total number of physical stores is far higher. At the moment, they include CVS, Duane Reade, RadioShack, Sunoco, Sports Authority, Foot Locker and New York City taxis. In coming weeks, Google says, more stores will come along, including Subway, Macy’s, Walgreens and Bloomingdale’s.
Someday, Google says, the readers will be installed at cash registers all across this great land.
Think of Wallet as a copy of your actual credit card. Wherever you might swipe a credit card, you can tap your phone instead. At the moment, though, the only credit card Wallet can impersonate is a Citibank MasterCard.
Someday, Google says, all kinds of credit cards from all kinds of banks will work with Wallet.

                                                      
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/technology/personaltech/googles-virtual-credit-card-can-replace-plastic.html?ref=technology