Company Makes Some Serious Coin
Many of us carry around several cards in our wallets: a personal credit card, debit card, business expense card, family account card, award card, etc. This stockpiling of cards leads to bloated and cluttered wallets. A startup called Coin has a solution to this wallet obesity epidemic. They make a slim little card that is programmable to act as all of your cards.
Via a smart phone card swiper and app, Coin takes information from your existing cards and loads it onto their card. You also take a picture of cards to have identifying pictures. When you’re ready to make a purchase, simply scroll through your available cards on your Coin device, select the one you want to use, and swipe.
Coin also features a Bluetooth signal that sends a push notification to your phone should you and the card be separated.
Coin is pretty cool, though we do have questions about its longterm relevance. We imagine it won’t be long before all of our spending power will be accessible via smartphone apps such as Google Wallet. We also think a great feature would be to show your balance, given that there’s an LCD screen. This might encourage more responsible card use, avoiding the “credit card premium” we mentioned the other day.
All that said, that fact is that most of us carry and use multiple cards, and Coin makes managing and storing those cards a bit easier. Coin will be delivering summer of 2014. Friday, December 13 is the last day to receive Coin’s half-off promotional pre-order price of $55. Visit their site for more details.