Mobile phones make payments at Coca-Cola machines

In a not too distant future, consumers in the good olD US of A will be able to walk up to vending machines and make Coca-Cola purchases using their cellphone. The same VeriSign Coke apparently intends to use already links the cellular operators and over 100 vending machines across Austria for customers of Mobilkom and ONE wireless. No word on whether or not this is going to use RFID or something, but we think it'd be in their best interests to keep it simple, and rock it SMS style. Now to figure out a use for all the change in our pockets.

[Via Slashphone]

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 15th 2006 2:23PM]

Well, I probaly won't discover America by saying that Japanese had cellphone-friendly Coca-Cola vending machines back in 2002. While the first generation of machines used bar-code scanners to conduct transaction, the second gen. machines are using NFC stahdard-based FeliCa technology. See details:
http://analytica1st.com/analytica1st/2006/02/coca-cola-ntt-docomo-deployed-5000.html

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 15th 2006 3:37PM]

even before 02, the first RFID cellular was in japan, nothing new about this.. infact the title should be,

'Finaly, North Americans get a decent Technology'

lol.. great stuff though.

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 15th 2006 4:24PM]

Finland (Sonera) was playing with the concept in 1997. We had one of their machines shipped to a U.S. event in 1998.

Granted the technology is old. The reason the U.S. is so far behind is that there is no consumer demand. Sure, if your reading this, your a geek and would love and adopt the concept. The problem is most other people haven't seen the connection between cell phones, their bank account, and pop machines.

Let's see if Cingular's latest announcement (wireless banking) changes this.

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 15th 2006 4:44PM]

Come'on, in Chile we had this service launched back in 2002. You send a message with your cellphone (the vendor ID, the softdrink ID) and a few seconds later, the machine outputs your can :)

[blueacewe Posted Nov 16th 2006 8:44AM]

I tried to use one of this in Singapore in 2002 and it wasn't a happy experience. I sent 3 messages and got no Coke.

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 17th 2006 2:06AM]

In Finland you call the machine. A woman answers and says something like "This service will cost 1,40 EUR. Thank you for calling." Not so much of a thrill.

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 17th 2006 12:25PM]

Simplewire was doing this at CTIA last year, brought in a vending machine and had it hooked up to a short code. Thing is, the app broke and when they rebooted, 30 cokes came spitting out of the vending machine.

Blah.

[(Unverified) Posted Nov 17th 2006 3:06PM]

In Chile, it also worked via short codes (something like *[machine id]*[soda id]#). You could buy subway tickets as well from other vending machines. IIRC both systems were canceled a couple of years ago.