I actually wanted to introduce a new section at my blog here, it would have been called ‘mobile ideas’. But sometimes your idea is just too simple and you realize you can’t be the only one thinking about it. My idea was Oyster Mobile. For non-Londoners: an Oyster Card is a card used for payments in public transport, used when entering and exiting the tube stations of London. You pay by touching an ‘oyster’, which is shown in the picture, with your card. The technology behind this is called Near Field Communication, which basically means that there are two chips and a wireless signal which is received when the chips are near each other. This technology can also be used for payments with your mobile phone. You can simply provide a phone with an NFC chip and connect it to an application on your phone to make payments. This was my initial idea, a bad one, I should have known they were already doing this in Japan and Korea (didn’t even check, but they must be) and I’ve read that succesful tests have been run here in London already as well. After the introduction of Oyster Mobile, you could only imagine the possibilities this will open for loyalty programs and supermarket checkouts.

But above all, it really bothers me that Dutch commuters have already been waiting for several years for the Dutch Oyster Card (OV Chip Card) to come along. A technique which is used in London for ages, and is even considered to be outdated by some people, has still not been fully put in practice in The Netherlands. Meanwhile the Dutch government has already spend millions on research and tests and provided all the train and metro stations with big automatic gates, which are continually open for several years because now one has a card to use it.

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