On Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:38:15 +0100, Graeme Wall
wrote:

In message
Roland Perry wrote:

In message om, at
00:45:18 on Tue, 26 Sep 2006, Neil Williams
remarked:
But if we are going to have cards being used like money then shouldn't
the banks be running it and not some transport quango? (I understand
Mint are already giving it a try)

Nottingham University and Mastercard (I think) tried it with contact
smartcards a number of years ago. Remember Mondex? I think it was
before its time, and it would work now if universally accepted.

The main trial was in Swindon Town, plus four Universities elsewhere.

Exeter was one.

Didn't work; but as you say it might have been a little early.

If the Exeter one was typical there were only a limited number of places that
would accept it, mainly on campus. The advantage Oyster has is that it
already in widespread use for its primary function, therefore any other
London business willing to use it will be opting into a large and growing
userbase from the start. However with the almost universal use of credit and
debit cards for transactions of more than a few pounds then what niche is it
going to fill? Automated newsagents would be one, now there's a thought...

In the Hong Kong system, they have (or did a couple of years ago)
Octopus (their version of Oyster) machines in places like shopping
centres that actually give you a small free credit (equivalent to 10p
or 20p or so), max once a day. So you would see a steady stream of
people going via that shopping centre and just touching their card on
the machine to collect a free 20p or whatever that machine gave. I
could see some places being keen to do things like that here, if
simply getting public footfall is important to them. I am sure you
could have variations on the above, e.g. every 1000th person gets a
£100 credit or something, to further encourage people to come via your
shopping centre.

Some burglar alarm or access systems I have programmed already have
the ability to read smart cards from other systems than their own -
you do not have to write anything to the "foreign system" smart card,
just read any sort of unique identifier off the card and use that in
the system's access control tables instead of expensive cards specific
to that system. I don't know if there are any commercially available
readers that can pull a unique id number of an Oyster yet, but there
is certainly potential for using them to control access to low
security things, like a vehicle barrier on a works car park or a
private road.

There are loads of interesting uses for smart cards that are in wide
public acceptance especially if you can disconnect from the thought
that they're a payment mechanism only.

As for payment I'm sure they had vending machines, parking meters etc
that accepted the card in Hong Kong and Singapore, I'm sure such
things will come here eventually too.