Smithsonian.com

The future of your wallet. Image courtesy of Flickr user feuilllu

I think my wallet’s depressed. Not that it’s said anything, but when you’ve been with something for so long, you know these things.

Can’t say that I blame it. Remember how when you wanted to show off pictures of your kids, you always reached for your wallet. Now you go straight to your cell phone. There are tons of photos there—along with emails, text messages, videos, games. The closest thing I ever came to playing a game with my wallet was Find the AAA Card and as I remember, it wasn’t that much fun.

And now, the unkindest cut: Mobile wallets which use a technology called Near Field Communication to turn smart phones into payment cards. Once we’re swiping our phones to pay for everything and we no longer need cash or credit cards, it’s pretty much game over for our folding leather friends.

Fortunately for them, that may be awhile. Yes, we’ve been hearing for years about the Japanese and Koreans buying everything from gum to gas with their phones. And here in the United States, there was much hoopla last summer around the launch of Google Wallet, the search giant’s plunge into the mobile payment business.

But a lot of hurdles have to be cleared before mobile wallets go mainstream. For instance, just this week word leaked out that Verizon is keeping the Google Wallet app out of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the next big Android smartphone, which is expected to roll out in stores tomorrow. Verizon says it’s a hardware integration issue, but others have speculated that it has something to do with the fact that Verizon, along with AT&T and T-Mobile, have formed a joint venture that will launch its own mobile wallet, called Isis, next year.

There are a lot of potential players who want a piece of this action. Big players—the major wireless carriers, digital heavyweights such as Google and Apple, and credit card giants like Visa, which is rolling out its own mobile wallet called V.me next year.  And at least for awhile, they’ll all want to do it their way.

Then there’s the matter of getting retailers to invest in the devices needed to read the mobile wallet chip. Why bother when swiping credit cards is working just fine? Eventually, though, businesses are likely to see how much mobile buying will enable them to learn about a person’s preferences, which, in turn, will allow them to personalize promotions and coupons to individual customers’ phones–something McDonald’s has been doing in Japan for more than a year now.

And then there’s us. We’d have to get over our nervousness about security. And we’ll also have to be convinced that it’s really more convenient or cost effective to use our phone instead of a credit card. That’s where loyalty programs come in, but ones in which your phone can determine, in real time, when you’ve qualified for a reward of free merchandise or an instant coupon.

But like I said, this could take some time, much as it did with ATMs. Even in Japan, mobile wallets are not quite mainstream.

So for now, hold on to your wallet, the real one.  And occasionally pretend to lose it.  You know, for old time’s sake.

And a venti latte for my phone

One U.S. business, though, has already gone all in on mobile wallets. Starbucks has had its own mobile payment app for about two years and it went national with it last January. Since then, 26 million Starbucks transactions have been through smartphones, with the rate now at about 3 million a month, roughly double what it was last winter.

No big surprises on where Starbucks’ mobile wallet business is booming: New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Here are other recent advances in the mobile payment biz:

• So you can buy candy even faster: A California firm has started installing mobile payment readers on vending machines around the country.  For now, though, you’ll only be able to buy your afternoon Skittles with a Google Wallet app.
• From shoppers, with love: To give the business a boost, Square, a San Francisco mobile payments start-up, is encouraging its users to purchase, for $1, gift-wrapped mobile wallet readers and hand them out to their favorite small businesses.
• Enter the bankers: MasterCard has entered into a partnership that will make it easier for banks to create their own mobile wallets.

Video Bonus: For a taste of mobile wallet shopping at the cutting edge, check out this Tesco video of its virtual grocery store in a South Korean subway station.  You can shop while you wait for a train by taking pictures of QR codes on photos of food.

Today’s question: What would it take for you to switch to a mobile wallet?

The kindness of strangers can pay dividends. Courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon

It’s time again for the old “Naughty or Nice” meme.  It is, as we all know, the essence of Santa Claus’ annual performance review, and to his credit, he has kept things simple. (Personally, I prefer the more age-appropriate “Dyspeptic or Nice,” but, as yet, no one’s been able to work it into a holiday jingle.)

The conventional wisdom is that Nice is tanking. Spend 30 seconds reading comments on most websites and you’ll feel a need to delouse.  Or hear the latest spouting of spite from Capitol Hill and it’s hard not to believe that civility isn’t just dead, it’s mummified.

So it gives me great pleasure to share the news of one brief, shining study where Nice wins.

Harvard researchers Nicholas Christakis and David Rand set out to understand why humans cooperate, particularly when the alternative is often glorified as the road to riches. Usually, this kind of research is done in a lab where scientists are limited to observing the give-and-take within pairs of people.

But the scientists wanted to see how this would play out in a much larger social network, one involving hundreds of people. So they took the inventive step of setting up a game and recruiting players through a website called Mechanical Turk–an online job pool created by Amazon to allow developers and businesses to hire people to perform tasks that can’t yet be handled by machines.

With about 800 recruits on board, the researchers let the games begin. Every player started  with an equal number of points, and was randomly connected with one or more players. Each would have the opportunity to be either generous, and give 50 points to every player they were connected with, or be selfish and do nothing. Then, after each round, about one-third of them had the opportunity to change their connections if they wanted.

It didn’t take long for the selfish players to take their toll on games involving people who weren’t allowed to select their partners.  After a dozen rounds, only 10 to 20 percent of the players were willing to give points to anyone else. It was classic “tit for tat” behavior, which is  at the heart of both a well-known game theory and analysis of how cooperation fits into the evolution story. 

Ah, but the generous players became very popular among those who were able to change their connections. People tended to gravitate to them and shun the ones who seemed to be looking out for themselves. And eventually most of the uncooperative players had a change of heart once they realized they’d become social pariahs.

In short, the study showed that if you let people rewire their social networks, they’ll seek out unselfish connections. Or, in an affront to high school football coaches everywhere, nice guys finished first.

Wired to be nice

While we’re on the subject of nice, it turns out there’s a gene for that.  Actually, it’s more of a genetic variation, but one that results in higher levels of oxytocin, the so-called “cuddle chemical” which makes us more trusting, empathetic and generous.

A new study found that observers could pick out the most empathetic people after watching only 20 seconds of silent video of them interacting with a loved one.  And the majority of the 10 people rated most trustworthy, based on their body language, had that genetic variation.  An even higher percentage of the 10 people considered the least empathetic didn’t.

So yes, some people are just born nice.

Here’s other recent research into why we do the things we do:

• The dark side of creative: A study published by the American Psychological Association concluded that creative people are more likely to cheat than less creative people, in part because they’re better at rationalizing their less than honorable behavior.
• When bad things happen to bad puppets: Infants, even those less than a year old, like to see bad behavior punished. In a study by American and Canadian scientists, babies most liked puppets that punished other puppets that behaved badly.
• What tipped them off? A peer-reviewed paper suggests that today’s financial institutions, with their high rate of turnover and expanding global power, are attracting people who have a hard time feeling empathy.
• Burritos on the brain: Male college students do not think about sex all day.  In fact, new research found that they think about food almost as often.

Bonus Video: Economist Paul Zak riffs on how training our brains to release oxytocin can get us in the holiday spirit.

Today’s question: Could you imagine winning a game by being cooperative?

Did Kinect hackers inspire a new breakthrough in technology? Image courtesy of Flickr user Atsushi Takoro

Remember that scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise manipulates 3-D images in mid-air simply by moving his hands. It’s a moment when you forget the plot, the setting, the sci-fi theme and you just sit there and think, “That is soooo cool.”

Flash forward to last fall when Microsoft rolled out its Kinect motion-sensing devices for the Xbox 360. At the time you didn’t hear many people say “This changes everything.”  It was mainly seen as Microsoft’s answer to Nintendo, a Wii without the wand that allowed people to play games simply by moving their bodies.

That’s clearly what Microsoft had in mind and it no doubt was supremely tickled when Kinect became the fastest-selling consumer tech product of all time—10 million sold in just four months.  But within weeks of its debut, Kinect began morphing into something much bigger.  First, hackers started using it to give robots 3-D vision. Then other tinkerers took it in more  directions—from creating interactive shadow puppets to adapting it so surgeons in operating rooms could manipulate CT scans by just waving their hands. Sound familiar?

At first Microsoft did the lawyer thing, threatening to “work closely with law enforcement groups” to keep people from tampering with its Kinect.  But savvier heads prevailed. Over the past year, it’s done a full 180 on this, first launching a website celebrating what it’s dubbed “The Kinect Effect,” then a month ago releasing  a very slick ad showing just how much Kinect has caught the wind. Just two weeks ago, Microsoft announced “Kinect Accelerator,” a program designed to help developers and startups create original products using the Kinect.

And then, earlier this week, word leaked out that the next version of Kinect will be able to read your lips and facial expressions and gauge how you’re feeling by the tone of your voice.

Yet as impressive as all of this sounds, I’m sure some of you may be thinking, “I don’t play video games, don’t own a robot, am not a surgeon and have never dabbled in shadow puppets, so what’s Kinect got to do with me?”

I’ll answer with another question: You’ve used a TV remote, right?

That’s where this is headed, to your living room.  No one wants to use a keyboard to control what’s on their TV.  A remote’s bad enough. And touching the screen isn’t very practical.  But being able to change channels by waving your hand, or calling out a number or even blinking your eyes, well, I’d say we have a winner.

Tell me what you want

The other hot item in the realm of human-machine bonding is Siri, the “personal assistant” that lives inside the iPhone 4S.  With its high-end voice recognition software, it carries out your spoken requests.  Need to send a text to a friend?  Tell Siri. Out-of-town and looking for Mexican food?  Ask Siri for recommendations.  Wondering if you’ll need an umbrella tomorrow?  Siri will be your weathergirl.

This, undoubtedly, is the future of search, but as with Kinect, hackers are broadening Siri’s horizons. One has figured out how to use the software to order his car to start.  Another has jerryrigged it so he can tell his thermostat to turn down, his lights to turn off and yes, his TV to turn on.

Here’s more from the world of human-machine relationships:

• There’s something in the air: From Russia comes a technology that one-ups Kinect.  It’s called DisplAir and uses an infrared camera, a projector and cold fog to produce 3-D images in thin air that can be controlled with hand movements.
• Please don’t type on my face: Keyboards may be on their way out, but virtual keyboards that can be reflected on almost any surface, and actually work, are coming soon.
• Ah, the touch of cardboard: Researchers in Germany have come up with a way to make clothing, furniture, even cardboard, work like the touch screen of an iPhone.
• You’re so cute when you write with your finger: A Finnish company has developed technology that turns walls into group screen-touching experiences. Already it’s being used in bars in Japan and Hong Kong.
• It’s not just a guy thing: Rebecca Rosen, associate editor at The Atlantic weighs in on why so many helper devices, such as Siri and GPS, have women’s voices.

Video Bonus: Can’t get enough of the Kinect hacks?  Here are a dozen more.

The Question: What would you like to see a body-motion technology like Kinect be able to do?