Your next wallet may be 8 mm thick and contain the only card you'll ever need.
Chameleon Network, in Concord, Massachusetts, plans to replace the stacks of credit, bank and customer-loyalty cards burdening modern consumers with a single, rewritable Chameleon Card, which works just like an ordinary card with a magnetic strip.
. The Chameleon Card's black strip covers a programmable transducer that mimics the information on the magnetic strips of the cards it is replacing. A new handheld device from Chameleon, the Pocket Vault, programs the Chameleon Card to take the place of any credit card the consumer chooses for a transaction.
Shoppers will be able to swipe their Chameleon Cards through the same magnetic readers used in stores and banks today. And instead of reading bar codes off the back of customer-loyalty cards, retail bar-code readers will scan the bar code displayed on the Pocket Vault itself.
The Pocket Vault has a slot for the Chameleon Card, but has no buttons or stylus. The device, which will be about half the size of an iPaq pocket PC, will be on sale in stores such as Best Buy and Circuit City as early as January 2005, according to Chameleon CEO Todd Burger.
First-time users of the Pocket Vault will read their old credit cards with the device, which stores their information internally and backs it up to an online or local database in case the Pocket Vault is lost or stolen. Each credit card stored on the Pocket Vault is then represented by an icon on the device's touch-screen display.
The Pocket Vault also prompts its owners to place their fingerprints on the device's reader pad to create a biometric profile.
To use the Chameleon Card for a credit card transaction, a shopper taps the logo on the Pocket Vault's display representing the credit card account he wants to use. Seconds later, the Pocket Vault spits out the shopper's Chameleon Card, with the selected credit card account number, expiration date and logo imprinted on its flexible display, and its transducer reconfigured to work in the store's or bank's magnetic card reader.
The Pocket Vault, which Burger expects to sell for less than $200, will also replace ExxonMobil's Speedpass and similar radio-frequency identification applications with its own, built-in RFID chips.
But the Pocket Vault promises to do more than prevent slipped discs caused by overstuffed wallets. Its security features should also help safeguard shoppers from the devastation of credit card fraud and identity theft, said Burger.
The Pocket Vault will only power up when it detects its owner's fingerprint. And unlike an ordinary credit card, the information stored on a Chameleon Card becomes unreadable (and the transducer inoperable) within 10 minutes.
The Pocket Vault also switches off shortly after ejecting a Chameleon Card.
That's plenty of time for a shopper to swipe his Chameleon Card through a magnetic reader at the grocery store, but hardly enough for a thief to do much damage to the shopper's credit.
"Your worst possible exposure," said Burger, "is that a thief may be able to get in one illegal purchase in the 10 minutes after the card is ejected from the (Pocket Vault)."
Chameleon Network may be just weeks away from signing an agreement with major credit card associations and other financial institutions.
Chameleon has built most of the components of the Pocket Vault system, and it has successfully tested its replacement for the Speedpass.
But an analyst warned that, although the Pocket Vault and Chameleon Card may be easy to use, consumers are typically reluctant to change their buying behaviors.
They may also balk at the Pocket Vault's strongest security feature, its use of fingerprint authentication.
"Consumers still associate biometrics with an invasion of their privacy," said Forrester Research analyst Penny Gillespie. "For better or worse, they see it as intrusive."
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