A consortium of major players (Philips, Sony, Nokia, Samsung and the credit card company Visa) has come together in an attempt to turn mobile phones in a new type of purchasing device.  The way it will work is that you'll place your phone against an item, and press a button on the phone to purchase it.    The idea seems to be that it could eliminate the bottleneck of the checkouts at stores.  There’s more on this story at The Inquirer.

There are two pieces of technology that underpin this: first, the incorporation of Radio Frequency ID tag readers (the occasionally controversial replacement for barcodes), and the technology from Chip and Pin credit/debit cards.

If this takes off, it could really change the way people shop.  But in order for it to work, the purchasing experience is going to have to better than the current checkouts we have now.  But I think it just might work. The trends are there already. For people, that are confident with technology, self-service checkouts are already a preferred choice…because these checkouts tend not to have long queues.  The devil is in the detail though; we’ll need great software on the phones to make purchasing super easy.