Carrying a hundred credit, debit, gift, and membership cards around in your wallet is one of those things that we’ve always hoped would become archaic given enough time. We’ve been waiting many long years, and other than the ability to use PayPal at the point of purchase it looks like we’ll be waiting a while before ALL of our cards can be chucked. Coin is here to push forward the transition into electronic PoP sales, no rubber-banded stack of cards needed.

Coin operates mostly like an electronic credit card. It’s durable, magnet-proof, and water resistant. It is reportedly tough enough to survive life in your wallet, too. The first step in setting up the Coin is to use the included card-swipe dongle to swipe all of your cards with your smartphone. You also take pictures of the cards, allowing the app to store all of the necessary info about each.

When you want to make a purchase, you can select the card to use via a small button on Coin’s front. The button scrolls through all of the stored cards until you spot the one you need. You then swipe the card like any other credit card and the payment is debited from the chosen account. Up to eight cards can be stored on Coin at one time, but the smartphone app can store unlimited cards.

For security purposes, the Coin app will let you know if you walk away without your card – provided you have your smartphone with you. Coin doesn’t need the phone to be present in order to function, but it will de-activate itself after a pre-set amount of time away from your phone. The included battery should keep Coin going for about two years and can be replaced after that. The retail price is $50 for now while the project is in fundraising mode, but is expected to double once the card becomes commercially available.

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The Living Wallet is a sweet little gadget that can help all of us get our spending under control. The smart wallet is linked to your iPhone and a bookkeeping app called Zaim.

When your financial situation is unfavorable and you have no business spending money, the wallet runs away from your grasping hands. If you ignore that warning and catch it, the wallet will yell for help and tell you to put it down. But if those evasive measures don’t work, the app pulls out a really dirty move: it calls your mom to tell on you.

On the other hand, when your financial situation allows you to spend a little more money, the wallet actually encourages you to make purchases. In fact, it kind of entices you to spend. It plays classical music, worms its way over to you and speaks out the names of Amazon products. Maybe it’s not the best money-saving plan, but it sure is adorable. No word on if this is being produced for purchase or if it’s just a novelty idea meant to entertain.

The post Living Wallet Runs + Screams When You Try to Overspend first appeared on Gajitz.

Did you know that most identity theft happens due to lost wallets or credit cards? The Ping* Wallet is a smart device that can tell you when a card falls out, when you forget to put a card back in your wallet, or even when your wallet is stolen.

Ping* is a Bluetooth-equipped aluminum case that links to your phone to help keep your information safe. When you take a card out of the wallet and fail to return it after a certain period of time, the wallet emits a sound to alert you. A built-in speaker alerts you if the wallet suddenly loses connection with your phone – whether it’s the phone or the wallet that has been pilfered.

If you happen to leave it somewhere, the Ping* can emit a sound to lead to you right to it – as long as you’re within 100 feet of it. This feature would be especially helpful for forgetful people who can never seem to get everything together in the morning. If a card is lost or stolen, the app will even tell you the last place you used it.

Despite all of its features, the Ping* is a mere 3 millimeters thick, or about the thickness of four stacked credit cards. It can hold 10 credit cards and a stack of cash comfortably in its aluminum and elastic embrace. Its electronic “brain” is tiny and flat and contains a battery that lasts for up to two years on a single charge.

The post Bluetooth Wallet Lets You Know if You Lose a Credit Card first appeared on Gajitz.

In developing nations, getting access to quick cash is not nearly as simple as it is in the first world. Rather than a quick run to the ATM, grabbing some money might involve a visit to a local loan shark. Not only is the concept of banking itself somewhat foreign, but the majority of the population is semi-literate or completely illiterate. This ATM concept from cash register company NRC Corp. would make it simple for illiterate people to access their savings since there is no need to read in order to operate it.

The ATM’s design is meant to make banking easy in areas of the world where banking is not a daily activity. When customers set up new accounts they are fingerprinted, so in order to access their cash they only have to press a thumb onto a fingerprint reader and press a color-coded button corresponding to the amount of money desired. The ATM itself is cylindrical in shape to make it more difficult to break into with a crowbar. If it is ever breached, the entire machine collapses into itself.

But the real obstacle that has to be overcome in third-world banking is finding customers. Will people without access to education really have an interest in banking? NCR is setting up tests for the unusual ATMs in the U.S. currently, and later will conduct tests in target markets like India and China.

The post ATM for Illiterate Populations Takes Quick Banking Global first appeared on Gajitz.

ATMs are kind of like pigeons these days: they’re everywhere you look in urban settings. The high-tech electronic bankers are a relatively recent invention, but we’ve quickly come to count on them. Way before the ubiquitous ATM there was this curious banking machine dating all the way back to 1918. It was called an automatic receiving teller – and if it wasn’t made obvious by the name, this machine only accepted deposits and could not help with withdrawals. This type of machine was used in schools and other organizations in the 1930s to encourage people to save their money by making frequent deposits to their savings accounts.

The machine works simply enough but at the time must have seemed like a marvel of machinery. If the customer wanted to deposit coins, the machine could tell what type of coins were being inserted (in the same way modern vending machines use the weight to tell the difference between coins). But customers depositing paper money had to actually set the slide dial on the machine to the amount they were depositing before telling the machine to stamp their bank books. We have to wonder how many people in the 30s tried to beat the system by tricking the machine into making their bank accounts look artificially flush.

The post Thrifty History: Antique ATM Encouraged Saving, Cheating? first appeared on Gajitz.