anyways one thing led to another and i was telling him of my belief that in some years, there will not be any transaction. there won't be any exchanged of money, or any cards or anything. everything will be done by apps on ur phone or some other mechanisms.
and then this struck me.
so imagine that you go to a shop, you see a shirt that you like, you try it on and you want to buy it. so you whisk out you phone, which has a barcode reader scanned, and you scan the tag. as you scan, the phone gets the information about hte article, the price, availability et al, and one you see all the info, if all is well, you say buy.
now the phone sends out a buy request, which is picked up by the wifi enabled store servers in someway, the store in return gives the account no to the phone, the phone now contacts the bank servers, checks if there is enough money to buy this, and if so, just transfers the money to the account of the shop.
in addition, the phone also gives information about the purchaser, who he is or a token or something.
the shop, sends a signal to the warehouse robot to pick that stuff, and put it in a bag of that purchaser.
this happens for every store of the mall, and finally when the purchaser is done shopping, s/he simple says leaving, and all the bag of all that he has purchased is delived to a common area to which he can drive and pick it up.
simple.
Advantages: No checkout counters, no people to man checkout counters, more space for actually putting the stuff, no individual inventories, common basement inventory. Shopper doens't have to carry stuff, purchases are directly debited from account, cannot buy more then allowed. and so on.
adding another level, maybe there is no store system, but instead the phone maps with location of each store, and GPS. so if the purchaser says buy, the phone already knows whoes account to put it in. as there is no interaction between people, but only machines, no data theft. or so i think.
next level, bar code embedded in you, as you enter, shop also knows who you are. so now both parties know each other.
yea i know, going to far!!!
later.
