By Kevin Ashton

In a current TV ad for MasterCard, break-dancers check out of a hip boutique in seamlessly choreographed perpetual motion until one young man makes the mistake of trying to pay with cash. Everything grinds to a halt. Then, realizing his error, the man reaches for his credit card and, with a single swipe, restarts the dance and restores his coolness. The point of the ad is that it's quicker and easier to use a card than to fumble with money. Visa has similar commercials.

These ads make me smile, and not because of their clever humor. By 1997, the credit card industry had developed RFID-based cards as an alternative to the familiar magnetic stripe. The idea was simple: Within a decade—so about now—everyone would be using smart cards that didn't need to be swiped to make faster, more convenient payments. Instead, we have a blitz of TV advertising touting the convenience of the good old magnetic stripe. So what happened, and what does it tell us about RFID?


First, the sudden and largely unforeseen rise of Internet connectivity in the late 1990s made it much easier for retailers to hook up their credit card terminals to data networks, and the card ID number stored in the magnetic stripe was more than enough to provide all the functionality and security anybody could ever need. Retailers didn't see the point of changing their checkout systems to support the newer chip-based cards.