Postcards from Perkistan

A new era in loyalty was kicked off this week with the release of Google Wallet. Google’s latest phone, the Nexus S 4G (currently unavailable in Australia) has Near Field Communications (NFC) built-in allowing contactless communication with the phone. The Google Wallet currently has one bank on board using the technology to allow contactless payments with the phone, and it is testing in Portland in the USA.

Google plan on rolling out the new technology on a city-by-city basis which means it will take a while for it to be available in Australia, a couple of years off yet at least. By then there will be a wide range of phones with the capability to use the wallet, however, so we can look forward to a wide range of acceptance as soon as the technology becomes available to us.

It’s a bit ho-hum at the moment as we sit back and look at all the hype surrounding the latest technologies, but all is not lost. The average consumer, as per the latest COLLOQUY survey, is a member of 18 loyalty programs. Far too many to fit in your wallet. The easiest way to know that you’re not going to miss a discount is to use the Perkler iPhone app. Pre-shop your purchases based on the cards in your wallet and their perks matched to your shopping destination. Download Now or Read more about Perkler for iPhone

What’s more, if your loyalty program isn’t included in the app you can get in touch with me and we will keep it up to date for you.

Cheers,
Graham

This entry was posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2011 at 11:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.