A consumer electronics exhibition in Australia will offer its patrons the ability to digitally carry their wallets inside their mobile phones.
Upon the purchase of their tickets, visitors will be able to elect to carry their event tickets, business cards, ShowCash debit cards and a Loyalty card, all in their phones during the exhibition. Tickets will be issued as SMSs, and ID cards saved as Address Book entries. These tickets and ID cards can then be scanned, as if they were physically presented in their paper or plastic form.
"We are very excited to be launching this as the world's first. We believe this to be a new frontier to the Digital Age, as it revolutionizes consumer lives and digital commerce," said Adrian Jenkins, CEO of AJB Publishing, the organizer of the event.
The creation, distribution and scanning of these mobile IDs are powered by START's MobileID patent-pending mobile ID technology. START Corporation is a provider of enterprise SMS solutions.
START MobileID technology enables this service by encoding the information otherwise stored in barcodes or magnetic strips into a special numeric geometry. This number is then optically scanned and decoded.
Unlike its picture-message counterparts, this technology is handset- independent and carrier-independent, and is supported by 100% of message-enabled handsets in the market, including GSM, CDMA, 3G, i-Mode and Blackberry. As numbers are language-independent, it is internationally compatible.
Such a technology can be used to securely replace tickets, vouchers, payment cards, loyalty cards, travel passes, ID cards, bill-payment barcodes or any other types of physical ID tokens. It is the beginning to the Age of the "Paperless Wallet".
START is also working with leading event registration service provider Info Salons to deploy this technology across conferences in the Asia Pacific Region. Info Salons has provided registration services for large-scale events such as CeBit.