“Imagine a technology that lets you pay for products just by waving your cellphone over a reader. The technology exists, and, in fact, people in Japan have been using it for the last five years to pay for everything from train tickets to groceries to candy in vending machines. […] But consumers in the United States won’t be able to wave and pay with their cellphones anytime soon: The myriad companies that must work together to give the technology to the masses have yet to agree on how to split the resulting revenue.”
- Cellphones as Credit Cards? Americans Must Wait - NYTimes.com
This is a nice synopsis of the American might of ingenuity bogged down by the sheer scale of choice. Just because you invent it doesn’t mean it’ll be used.
