Odd-Shaped Membership Cards
on 12.20.06, 04:39pm in life • comments (1)
Just this past week, the gym that I go to issued me a new membership card.
Instead of the old ‘credit-card’ style, it’s a funky shaped card-like plastic that keeps falling out of my wallet every time I open it up. What I don’t understand is why every supermarket, gym, library, hardware store, etc., not only need to all have their own special ‘club’, but can’t just use your phone number instead of requiring a card. It’s annoying.
Neil Cowburn (December 21, 2006 @ 1:31 am)
That’s a really good point, but with a few drawbacks. Most people have a landline, so the number is unique to the address. However, I recently bought a car and they needed 2 utility bills as proof of my identity and address. I offered them my landline phone bill and they refused it on the grounds that landlines can easily be redirected and as such are an open mechanism for identity fraud. I then offered them my cellphone bill and that they accepted.
In a previous role, I worked on a SMS vouchering system and I remember there being some research done into the viablility of machine-readable SMS messages. The idea being that a customer receives a SMS with a voucher code (could easily be a membership number) and they would approach a terminal with a built-in camera, display the SMS on the phone and point the screen at the camera. The machine then would OCR the voucher code on the phone’s screen and validate the voucher. I’m not sure how far that went, but I can certainly see plenty of useful applications for the concept.