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The Saga of the Virtual Wallet

Posted by samzenpus on from the holding-the-purse-strings dept.

theodp writes "Fourteen years ago, Microsoft Wallet promised 'secure, convenient purchasing on the Internet.' That was then, this is now. TechCrunch reports that the first commercial for Google Wallet has been unveiled, and it stars Seinfeld's George Costanza and his overstuffed, exploding wallet. At launch (TBD), Google Wallet will allow you to use a Google Nexus S 4G (from Sprint) to tap-to-pay using Citi MasterCard cards or the Google Prepaid Card. Not to be outdone, PayPal offered a video sneak peek of its upcoming virtual wallet offering, which is promised to be more than 'just shoving a credit card on a phone.' In May, PayPal sued Google over electronic wallet technology, alleging that the search giant hired two of its former execs to obtain trade secrets for a mobile transactions project."

1 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Re:CyberCash by Owyn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Someone remembers that! I worked at CyberCash. I was the primary author of the merchant server component (CashRegister, MCK, SMPS, whatever it was called) for a couple of years, before it got handed off to another team and I was assigned to the SET project (does anybody remember that piece of crap?). It was the first C++ app I ever wrote, and I was a college student, so I literally had the Stephens books on Unix and TCP/IP open on my desk as I worked 14 hours a day to complete the first version. They hired me full time after that and I eventually rewrote most of it to not suck as much. There was ONE version that leaked no memory, all the others were pretty much crap. Sorry about that to anyone who was using it at the time. :) It was all designed before SSL was implemented in browsers so it used real RSA crypto which was fun to work on (those parts were written by graybeards, I just did all the integration). All that stuff probably should have just been a web service / API but at the time nobody really knew how to build web apps and there was no other way to do end-to-end security, so it was all written from scratch. It was plain C++. STL was flaky and Boost didn't exist. I basically wrote a web server and a database and an asynch message processing daemon all rolled in one app that sat between the consumer wallet and the central cybercash gateway which unwrapped everything and talked to the "real" bank. Fun project!