Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Early Adopter Rush—Thank you, Google Wallet

Choosing to be an early adopter of technology means a trade-off.

On the one hand, you spend a lot of time fiddling with gadgets, trying to get them to work, dealing with the frustration that they don’t always work, and often times, accepting the fact that you’ve thrown away some money.

All of this is offset by the occasional “home run” when you get to do something (and then show it off) to people who say “WOW! I’ve never never seen that before.”

Well, recently, I’ve hit the jackpot in the form of Google Wallet on my lovable Nexus 4.

Basically, what it allows me to do is to just tap my phone to the credit card payment terminal and (with a  pre-selected card—I have 4 loaded in) pay for whatever it is. No physical card required.

The receipt shows up on my phone (and I get an email later as well). That’s very cool, but what’s REALLY cool is the reaction I get from people.

I imagine (or so I tell myself) that it’s similar to the way people must have reacted when they saw a plane or a car for the first time many years ago.

Jaws drop and they routinely say “What is that?! How did you do that?”

And, for a slight moment, I get to feel like I  am visiting from the future.

It happened at BWI rail station recently and I got the guy (Mike) on video describing it.

Pretty soon, this will be commonplace, but for now, I get to ride the wave and get payback for all of those nights when stuff just didn’t work.

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