I just got finished reading this story on the Register about SMS enabled solar powered parking meters and how stealing money from parking meters is going to be tougher now in Eastbourne because the meter knows how to send an SMS meter in distress alert to the police department. Additionally, the device will let a meter attendant know that it needs to be purged of coins.

That’s a clever use of the technology but I’ve got a much better idea, one that eliminates the possibility of theft, the need to have coins collected and also turns the pricing model on its side by using dynamic pricing.

How? Let consumers start and stop the meter by using their mobile devices and replace the pay per minute model with demand based per minute pricing. If the meters are all mobile enabled devices capable of conducting a transaction then a central database knows what the inventory of available spaces looks like throughout the day… if the lot is busy guess what, the prices go up because available inventory is scarce. Conversely, when the lot is slow prices are reduced to incent consumers.

Crazy?

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If you’re an American Express customer (I am) you’ll be happy to know that they just launched a mobile version the American Express web site. I participate in the American Express Labs so I get notified to test new stuff when it hits the street. I tried it out this morning and had full access to my Account Summary. Something’s a little weird about that login though. Passwords are case sensitive and this Login control insisted on uppercasing the first character so I was sure that I would not get access to the site because my first character is not that case. Surprisingly, I got in and was able to:

• Check my balance
• View recent account activity
• View the pay my bill option

American Express did brand a new URL for this launch, it’s amexmobile.com which will get you back to an AmericanExpress.com page. I can’t understand why banks and credit card companies insist on doing this. We consumers are hyper sensitive to entering our account credentials to access our financial accounts on domains that we’ve never seen before. I suspect it’s because keying on a mobile handset is wonky at best sometimes and amexmobile.com is much shorter than the actual destination which is https://www99.americanexpress.com/myca/mobl/us/?r=l_l.

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IntoMobile sez, “Say What”? Looks like IntoMobile was one of the first to report this too, it’s been 2 hours and they’re still the only story on Google News when searching for GPay, it’s also on TechMeme. Here’s the Patent Application.

I included legal on the tagging because I don’t think we’ve heard the end of this one.

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It’s coming if you’re not so prepare. In China consumers are making direct purchases with their cell phones, so why isn’t the rest of the world? Mike Elgans opinion piece “Why Your Next Phone Will Be Your Wallet” at Computer World is worth the read. Mikes’ done his research and it appears that the U.S. is right on the verge of this technology becoming a reality.

I believe that early adopter consumers are ready. But, what about the phone? More specifically, the battery technology. The batteries on our mobile devices are remarkably average aren’t they? I’ve got a 3 month old LG 3g phone and I can blow out 3 bars on a couple of 5 minute conversations. I don’t want to be worried about my battery while I’m in line at the grocery store do you?

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Skype 3.2 beta for Windows is available from today. If you’re adventurous and an experienced Skype user, download now.

A nice new feature is the introduction of Paypal via Skype. For paypal use, both the sender and receiver just need to have a PayPal account. Can’t imagine why ebay own these two proggies? hmmm?

This feature is subject to PayPal limitations. You need to be in countries where Paypal supports respectively sending or receiving money. If you use it to send money to someone who cannot receive it, the funds are returned to your account or credit card, so it’s fine and no money is lost.

Importing contacts may help you find out that your friends are already on Skype, just not in your contacts yet. When the importer has downloaded your contacts from the various sites, it does an intelligent search on the Skype network to see if these people are already on Skype. They often are, and so you don’t need to pursue them to download Skype or anything - you can just add them to your contacts right away. But if they are not on Skype yet, you can send them an e-mail to invite them to Skype straight from Import contacts wizard.

Will be interesting to see how they start to push the paypal thing over the next few months when this comes out of beta. The question is, does this bode well or will it be another nightmare for us to deal with in our constant battle against fraudsters?

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