After having hit a bad streak of rants over the past few months it seems like I’m turning the corner.  My Nintendo Wii experience was a great and now I’m happy to report that Mastercard PayPass is pretty cool.

Once again, I wasn’t sure what the big deal was with the PayPass card; How excited can a person get with a card that has an embedded RFID chip.  It wasn’t until I was at a drive thru at Jack In The Box that it finally clicked.

I whipped out my card, tapped the card reader and was on my way.  The whole transaction took 2 seconds!  I was amazed and overjoyed.   It made me wonder how a credit card company can process billions of transactions around the world with modern technology yet we can’t seem to provide the same level of identification in places where it’s really needed.

Places like checking if a person has valid insurance after a car collision. One tap and you’d know to arrest someone for not carrying insurance on their car or issue a citation.  Why can’t we do this at a job engagement to verify legality of the person applying for a position?  It would seem that this would work great at bars to verify the age of people buying liquor too.

It’s pretty obvious to me though that this is the wave of the future.  I can easily foresee a future where RFID enabled documentation, tags, or cards will be required to transact in the future.  Heck, it doesn’t even need to be on a card, the chip is so small it can likely be placed on a ring or under the skin.

Wow, the more I think about it the more it creeps me out.