McDonald’s lets you buy burgers with your cell
It’s been in the works for a long time now - the promise of being able to purchase goods and services using your cellphone. There have been a couple of false starts but it seems that the channel has the caught the attention of some big consumer brands. McDonald’s and Japanese cell company NTT DoCoMo have announced a deal whereby customers will be able to purchase food using the cell phones.
Julie Ask and analyst at Jupiter says “The deal could also provide invaluable information about customer behaviour, it gives McDonald’s and DoCoMo the opportunity to track consumers and their eating habits.”
There are quite a few trials being rolled out in places like Japan and the Uk traditionally early adopters of wireless applications, I think this is a massive growth area and it will be interesting to keep an eye on developments. Closer to home in Vancouver, I had the idea about a year ago to allow Transit passengers to be able to download their monthly passes to their cell phones and use DRM style technology to prevent fraud. Instead of carrying your paper pass all you have to do is flip open your cell to show your digital pass. Be interesting to see whether that has legs.