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Nokia Launches Pay-By-Phone Service
adeelarshad82 writes "The world's top mobile phone maker, Nokia, said it would launch a mobile financial service next year targeting consumers, mainly in emerging markets, with a phone but no banking account. Nokia's Money service was based on the mobile payment platform of Obopay, a privately-owned firm that Nokia invested in earlier this year, and it is now building up a network of agents. Obopay, which uses text messaging and mobile Internet access, charges users a fee to send money or to top up their accounts."
Oh you mean in a similar way that O2 (a UK mobile company) started doing in the UK recently with their Cash Manager card?
O2 Cash Manager - "You load money onto the card, (using your phone or other methods) then whenever you use it you'll receive a free real time text alert. This will tell how much money you've loaded, spent or withdrawn, and how much you've got left. Simple."
Remember those 1-900 porn numbers? Those were the days.
Last time we were trying to push USSD based 'small payment system' in GSM networks, the Central Bank (of that country) launched an independent study which found that security practices in GSM networks were below standards to permit financial transactions. Cloning and some weaknesses in A3, A5 and A8 (and other algorithms/mechanisms) played major concerns.
TFA does not mention anything about security, but, I was wondering how exactly they would take care of this.
hilarious
Congratulations on your purchase of a brand new nigger! If handled properly, your apeman will give years of valuable, if reluctant, service.
INSTALLING YOUR NIGGER.
You should install your nigger differently according to whether you have purchased the field or house model. Field niggers work best in a serial configuration, i.e. chained together. Chain your nigger to another nigger immediately after unpacking it, and don't even think about taking that chain off, ever. Many niggers start singing as soon as you put a chain on them. This habit can usually be thrashed out of them if nipped in the bud. House niggers work best as standalone units, but should be hobbled or hamstrung to prevent attempts at escape. At this stage, your nigger can also be given a name. Most owners use the same names over and over, since niggers become confused by too much data. Rufus, Rastus, Remus, Toby, Carslisle, Carlton, Hey-You!-Yes-you!, Yeller, Blackstar, and Sambo are all effective names for your new buck nigger. If your nigger is a ho, it should be called Latrelle, L'Tanya, or Jemima. Some owners call their nigger hoes Latrine for a joke. Pearl, Blossom, and Ivory are also righteous names for nigger hoes. These names go straight over your nigger's head, by the way.
CONFIGURING YOUR NIGGER
Owing to a design error, your nigger comes equipped with a tongue and vocal chords. Most niggers can master only a few basic human phrases with this apparatus - "muh dick" being the most popular. However, others make barking, yelping, yapping noises and appear to be in some pain, so you should probably call a vet and have him remove your nigger's tongue. Once de-tongued your nigger will be a lot happier - at least, you won't hear it complaining anywhere near as much. Niggers have nothing interesting to say, anyway. Many owners also castrate their niggers for health reasons (yours, mine, and that of women, not the nigger's). This is strongly recommended, and frankly, it's a mystery why this is not done on the boat
HOUSING YOUR NIGGER.
Your nigger can be accommodated in cages with stout iron bars. Make sure, however, that the bars are wide enough to push pieces of nigger food through. The rule of thumb is, four niggers per square yard of cage. So a fifteen foot by thirty foot nigger cage can accommodate two hundred niggers. You can site a nigger cage anywhere, even on soft ground. Don't worry about your nigger fashioning makeshift shovels out of odd pieces of wood and digging an escape tunnel under the bars of the cage. Niggers never invented the shovel before and they're not about to now. In any case, your nigger is certainly too lazy to attempt escape. As long as the free food holds out, your nigger is living better than it did in Africa, so it will stay put. Buck niggers and hoe niggers can be safely accommodated in the same cage, as bucks never attempt sex with black hoes.
FEEDING YOUR NIGGER.
Your Nigger likes fried chicken, corn bread, and watermelon. You should therefore give it none of these things because its lazy ass almost certainly doesn't deserve it. Instead, feed it on porridge with salt, and creek water. Your nigger will supplement its diet with whatever it finds in the fields, other niggers, etc. Experienced nigger owners sometimes push watermelon slices through the bars of the nigger cage at the end of the day as a treat, but only if all niggers have worked well and nothing has been stolen that day. Mike of the Old Ranch Plantation reports that this last one is a killer, since all niggers steal something almost every single day of their lives. He reports he doesn't have to spend much on free watermelon for his niggers as a result. You should never allow your nigger meal breaks while at work, since if it stops work for more than ten minutes it will need to be retrained. You would be surprised how long it takes to teach a nigger to pick cotton. You really would. Coffee beans? Don't ask. You have no idea.
MAKING YOUR NIGGER WORK.
Niggers are very, very averse to work of any kind. The nigger's most
they should hurry up implementing this, before someone else does...
the amount of money to be made here is enormous
Won't this fall foul of money laundering regulations?
Where is the need for a mobile phone? Why can't this be done with just a credit card and an RFID chip instead like the Barclaycard OnePulse. Investing in infrastructure for this kind of card would make a hell of a lot of more sense to me.
Nokia n900 specs revealed: http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/
If any of you have lived in countries that are less developed, you will notice that most people will have a cell phone, but not a bank account, credit card or anything other than cash. The good news about these types of services is that they are begining to provide the majority of the world with the opportunity to have money "on account" and can actually be used more and more like a credit card. If you need something or want to buy something from someone, you can transfer money from your account to someone else. I saw this happening already in countries like Botswana, believe it or not! Applaud the development of technology that may have very little impact on you but could stand to help billions of people in the world.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
If proper certificates preinstalled on the phone and bank server by phone manufacturer, public key crypto shouldn't be vulnerable to man in the middle, and insecurity of GSM wouldn't matter. Nokia is exactly in position to do it.
parties). At THE they started to Series of debates to place a paper OPEN PLaTFORM, Java IRC client
GSM only authenticates one way, not both, so it is almost ideal setup for man in the middle attacks. One of the presentations at last year's CCC, the 25C3 covered this, but you can find plenty of older and newer material on it elsewhere.
Any GSM phone-based payment system has some big challenges. GPRS could be better, since you can then run something behind SSL or SSH. However, even then, when it comes to money, the designers must design the system on the assumption that the network is insecure, perhaps even the endpoints.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I thought it was already quite common to pay for things via a mobile phone in Europe and Asia. The transactions and billing show up on the phone statement. My company has a client who was interested in this sort of thing for their service and instead had to go with a clumsy workaround. Apparently credit card companies and banks have lobbied quite hard to keep anyone else from encroaching on their business.
So I'm curious to see if Nokia's service will ever see the light of day in the US. American financial institutions are so in bed with the government that they're basically protected from the need to actually be competitive.
Practical purposes, with the num3er THINKING ABOUT IT. Committerbase and project returns
I suppose the trend is unstoppable by now as we all jumped right into it with our credit and debit cards. Still, I'm always amazed that people willingly pay to pay, that is, give a fraction of the transaction to some third party, just for allowing the transaction to take place. In the good old days of cash, the passing of money from one hand to another was free. Now it appears that every time I need to pay for something, I need to pay a little more. Is that really acceptable? Am I the only one who's not too excited by this?
I've been doing pay as you go for the past 8 months with Virgin Mobile which uses the Sprint network. It's been convenient to top up since I get the topup cards at Wal Mart while I'm shopping for my weekly goods. I buy a $20/200 minute card and could get better /minute rates if I did a minute pack and paid more for each topup. All in all it's a good setup, although there are a couple of times where my remaining minutes were exhausted before I could topup and had to go get a card to call back, which was mildly embarrassing due to poor planning on my part.
.. here in Philippines.
I believed this service is far more successful in third world country. In some place there's no paypal or even
the concept of wire transfer is quite alien to them. it's easier to send money through sms than going to the
bank and depositing money to someone's account.
SMS is ubiquitous you have a phone you have SMS facilities.
Some assumptions being made on this thread are somewhat incorrect.
If you wish to launch a money transfer service in a country youll have to be vetted by the regulatory bodies in question.
Transferring and using phone credits as money would extend the reach of the phone credit facility into financial regulatory models. This doesnt happen.
For money transfer systems a separate account is required.
You are competing with and taking business from banks, you need a network of agents who will accept your virtual money, you need to ensure those agents are trustworthy and that yours and your customers money is safe, you need to ensure that the technology is fraud proof, corruption proof, and available.
This is no minor undertaking and very few implementations have succeeeded outside of safaricom's mpesa.
The technology is relatively simple actually, its everything else around it that makes it hard to succeed in this emerging industry.