The First Step to Cell Phone eCommerce
Along with all the other cool things cell phones will be able to do eventually, they should probably let buy things online – not just through your provider's network, but through whatever merchant website you happening to be visiting at the moment. Say you see a really cool gadget while you're out walking or driving around. You check your favorite online merchant, find a good price and with the press of a button, your purchase is winging its way to your home or office. Pretty cool, right? And you know merchants would love the opportunity to pull in more online business. Well, before any of that can happen, transmissions through your cell phone need to be secure enough to appease credit card companies, who stand to lose a lot of money to cell phone hackers. Spansion, a flash chip maker based in Sunnyvale, CA, is working on a solution: they're planning on embedding security modules into their flash chips. The new chips should launch in 2007, although when we'll see them playing a role in cell phone ecommerce is anyone's guess.
