The Gemalto Contactless Challenge starts tomorrow morning at 6am and if I plan to buy anything with my phone I better put some money in it. (On it?) One of the great things about this challenge is that Gemalto is giving us their money to spend. The funds arrived this weekend in the form of a prepaid Green Dot MoneyPak card.
MoneyPak + other free offers loaded into the Isis Wallet
The Verizon Isis Mobile Wallet is an electronic wallet that holds all of your payment sources including a built in Visa Debit card. You can add funds to this card via a variety of sources including prepaid cards that you buy at stores like Walmart Activating this card and then loading the prepaid funds into it was straight forward and all worked quickly and painlessly. I simply took debit card ID and entered it into the MoneyPak website along with the prepaid card ID and within seconds everything was transferred into the phone. I could see the new balance and I’m ready to go.
I was actually surprised that any of this worked but that could be my own prejudice from recently transferring money into Dwolla and then into MT.Gox to buy some bitcoins all right as the US government shut down Dwolla as a funding source and then Liberty Reserve for laundering money. But I digress.
Transferring funds from a prepaid card into my phone.
With JPMorgan Chase, Visa and the other heavy weight financial institutions all part of the Isis consortium I think its safe to say that this is a legit service. Security is one of the big benefits of using the Isis mobile wallet and I’m for sure going to talk more about it in the coming week.
For now, I’m all set for the challenge. I’ve got a breakfast meeting this morning with one of the founders of Indeed and I’m going to try to pay for it using the Isis mobile wallet. In the history of me, I’ve ever paid for anything using my smartphone as a wallet so I’m excited about this technological first. Like my first tweet it will likely be a memory that will stay with me forever. My first tweet BTW was about taking care of my daughter Jenny on March 26th 2007:
Taking care of Jenny.
— Josh Kerr (@joshkerr) March 26, 2007
