Coffee and iPhones: from today, pay for coffee with mobile payment

By now, the various iPhones, iPads, BlackBerries and smartphones of all kinds have "colonized" our lives filling us with more or less useful applications(apps as they are called in the jargon) ... one of the latest is one that allows you to make payments using your own device and Starbucks, the world's most famous coffee chain, has created the Starbucks Card Mobile application that allows you to pay for coffee with your mobile device.

Downloadable for free from its website or litine, this apps allows those with a BlackBerry cell phone or Apple iOs device (and thus iPhone, iPod, iPad) to pay for cons at any of the chain's 7,500 establishments operating in the United States. The only requirement for the user is, of course, to have the necessary availability (by making deposits through the PayPal system or credit card) in the account on which the transactions will be supported.

Thus, we are in a phase where mobile payment enters overbearingly into our daily lives, where instead of paying for our coffee with a classic coin it will be enough to show up at the cashier with a smartphone and synchronize it with the optical reader present in the establishment and set up to read barcodes in electronic format: a few clicks on the display and the amount of the consumption is charged to the account.

It seems that this payment system has already met with considerable success in the establishments where it has been tested, so much so that one in five customers would rather pay with their cell phone or tablet than with the more traditional payment methods. Company vice president Brady Brewer, in an interview with the USA Today newspaper, focused on the concept, confirming that the one just launched is "the most convenient way to pay, because you don't carry your wallet and purse all the time, but your cell phone does."

Will this payment system be successful in Italy? At the moment there are strong doubts given that Italians are last in Europe as the use of credit cards and electronic payments in general ... the dear old cash is still always preferred by the inhabitants of the Boot.