From my understanding and from what I've read online, iBeacon is an app made by Apple that will allow shoppers to interact with retailers through their mobile devices. Currently this is not available worldwide and from what I can gather are only in Apple stores so far. Basically what iBeacon does is when someone is walking around a store and is looking on a product, say an iPhone, they will get a message on their smartphone that will give them details about the product: the price, possible discounts, reviews, etc. In the future, if this gets funded, you'll probably be walking around the mall and you could check iBeacon and it will recommend products products that you would like to buy or try out. It's a neat idea, but all I think it is is just a way to replace some employees who's jobs is trying to get you to sell the product in the first place. It's kind of like having customer service on your phone instead of a person giving information. I'm not at all against iBeacons, I just found out about them today, but for a person like me who lives in the Philippines where whenever I walk into a store there's like 5-10 workers there trying to sell products to shoppers, iBeacons could make people lose their jobs. Although the possibility of that happening is probably still far away, it still could happen.
WHAT OTHER ELECTRONIC PAYMENT SYSTEMS EXIST TODAY?
I live in a family where almost all of our payments are real money based. Very rarely do we buy things online (it's probably cuz my parents don't trust online systems with their credit cards) so I'm not very familiar with much electronic forms of payment, but I know the basics. Online shopping in sites like Amazon and Ebay are probably one of the most popular where people pay for items online with their credit cards. On the subject of cards, recently I found out about a Starbucks Card, which is no more than a credit card for Starbucks. On the other hand, in the United States, there is this thing called 'Tweet a Coffee'. It's pretty self explanatory, someone could tweet a friend a coffee for Starbucks and the friend will receive a $5 digital eGift where they can redeem in Starbucks. Another form of electronic payment that I recently stumbled upon are Bitcoins.
