Just got back from CT/ST 2007 (http://www.ctst.com/CTST07/) in San Francisco. I think the coolest demo (certainly from a consumer perspective, anyway) was Sony FeliCa – http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/ctst_2007.html. (Is anyone else vaguely weirded out by that product name?)

The demo showed a payment system based on Sony’s embedded RFID chip. None of it is new technology, but it was executed with style. Here were the scenarios, each of which was demo’d with live hardware:

* Walk past an ad-enabled poster with a FeliCa-enabled cell phone. A coupon for the product gets sent to your phone (via RFID). Now, when you go to the POS terminal at the store, not only can you scan your phone to make the payment, but you also redeem the coupon.

* Buy groceries via any of a variety of available payment systems (the I rep I was speaking with said that some POS terminals in Japan now support as many as three competing RFID-based payment systems. He also said that self-service checkout is rare in Japan.). When you pay for the groceries, a parking payment voucher is uploaded into the device (card, phone, or FOB).

* Use the same device, cell phone in this case, to enter the subway. The demo included an RFID-enabled turnstyle.

* Finally, buy a USB RFID reader and plug into your Playstation 3 (first time I’d actually seen that console in person – pretty slick)! Now you can trade money/credits from your cellphone into PS cash to download new games, etc.

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