Smart Cards

Some of the nation's top credit card issuers are expected to announce shortly that they plan to issue chip-embedded "smart cards" to provide their customers with new services, particularly while shopping on the Internet. FleetBoston Financial will unveil its smart-card program today, company executives said. Last year, American Express became the first U.S. credit card issuer to offer smart cards.

For years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has wanted a seamless fare system that would allow transit riders to use the same pass to board buses and trains from different lines across Los Angeles County. But a decade after the MTA began its effort to replace paper tickets with smart cards, the project has almost doubled in price and is still not finished. A new audit done for the agency by KPMG reveals that the cost of the Transit Access Pass program has risen from $78.5 million to $154 million since 1998 and that the deadline for completing the system has been extended from an initial estimate of three years to more than 10. The KPMG report, released late last week, also concluded that the project lacks oversight, is understaffed by the MTA and has no plan detailing when the project will be finished or how much it will cost.

Motorola Inc. said it has created a business unit to produce smart cards, devices about the size of credit cards that contain personal and financial information. Motorola is already the leading provider of microprocessors for smart cards. Its new unit will expand into producing the cards themselves, the products that read them and encryption technology to safeguard the information.

As owners of one of the oldest ferry services in America, Tom and Judy Bixler steer their craft across the narrow Tred Avon River dozens of times each summer day to link two sleepy Chesapeake Bay towns known for crabs, not jihadists. "The ferry goes pretty slowly," Judy Bixler said of the seasonal service, which dates back to 1683. "It's not like someone could commandeer it and go anywhere." But under a little-known domestic security program, the Bixlers and about 1.

One of the things that made "smart cards" popular in Europe was the fact that before smart card readers were widely available at most retailers, they were everywhere else ["E-Commerce May Help Americans Learn to Love Smart Cards," Oct. 11]. Every possible vending machine had them, pay phones had them, virtually any pay-as-you-go utility device had them. Europeans were sold on convenience, and this was aided, as mentioned in the article, by standardization. Smart cards enabled another type of convenience that had been unknown in Europe until the emergence of such cards: the ability to easily go from one country to another without having to convert large amounts of cash.

Just as we're all struggling to grasp the idea of debit cards and home banking, they tell us that "smart cards" are coming, moving us further toward tellerless, paperless, bankless financial transactions.

Retailing giant Target Corp. is phasing out computer chips on its Target Visa cards due to limited shopper use, dealing a setback to proponents of "smart card" technology. Target announced the move Tuesday, less than three years after it introduced the cards. The technology allowed cardholders to download discount "coupons" from the Internet or in-store kiosks onto the cards, then use the coupons in Target stores.

How smart is a Smart Card? Tonight's speaker at the World Affairs Council of Ventura County will provide an answer while discussing the plastic, wallet-sized cards during a meeting beginning at 7:30 at the Cal State Northridge satellite campus in Camarillo. "The presentation will be about the little credit cards with computers in them," said Nathan Pratt, chairman of the council, which is sponsoring the talk. "And how they have taken over in Europe and are now coming to America."

Among the most ambitious and important technology events at the Atlanta Olympics this month will be Visa's smart-card project--the first large-scale experiment with cash card technology in this country. Visa will issue about 2 million cash cards, which, unlike traditional credit cards, each contain a microprocessor chip storing a specific cash value.

A single prepaid fare card will let riders use any county bus and rail system by September 2003, transit officials said Monday. Los Angeles County's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Metrolink and 17 municipal bus operations have agreed to honor a "smart card" to increase ridership and convenience for public transit users, officials said. Customers will be able to use the same wallet-size card on buses and commuter trains from Santa Monica to San Dimas. San Diego-based Cubic Corp.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to replace bus, subway and train passes with electronic fare cards, officials announced Monday. The rechargeable cards, known as Transit Access Passes -- or TAP cards -- will be sold at vending machines across Los Angeles County. Riders will also be able to add money to the cards online.

Over the last few months, ink has been spilled and pixels slung from mainstream magazines like Time to niche blogs such as Art of Manliness extolling the return of a practically extinct Victorian-era relic known as the calling card. A kissing cousin to the standard-issue business card containing little more than name and contact information, the calling card is being embraced by a swath of the under-40 set that includes hipster creatives, networking moms and untethered job seekers.

The warning: When checking out of a hotel, never return the room key card! The myth: Computerized hotel key cards are routinely imprinted with guests' personal information, including names, addresses and credit card numbers. The truth: Hotel companies and law enforcement agencies have said repeatedly that such information isn't put on the cards. How it started: In 2003, a Pasadena police detective spread the warning without checking its veracity.

Imagine getting on a bus without having to fumble for exact change or wait behind somebody trying to stuff crumpled dollar bills into the fare box. Consider transferring from the subway onto a bus operated by the city of Long Beach or another municipal transit agency using the same prepaid pass. For Wally Shidler, the fantasy has begun: He simply taps his new transit "smart card" every time he boards the Blue Line or gets on a Metro bus.

REGARDING James Gilden's article "New 'Chip and PIN' Credit May Cause Confusion Overseas" [Travel Insider, July 9], I called Citi Card since we are leaving on a three-week trip to Sweden, Finland and Russia next week. I had requested new cards two weeks ago and received them. At the time, I had inquired about "smart cards," and they seemed to know nothing about them. After reading the article, I called again. After being transferred to several representatives, I finally got someone who was able to minimally answer my question.

A U.S. appeals court panel upheld a Federal Communications Commission decision to hold AT&T Inc. liable for as much as $553 million in fees on prepaid calling cards. The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington denied AT&T's petition to review the FCC's decision from last year. The court ruling allows telephone carriers and the government to pursue San Antonio-based AT&T to recover fees and access charges.

The Santa Ana Unified School District on Monday kicked off its innovative Smart Card program, designed to help students get jobs as well as improve their academic performance. Billed as the first program of its kind in the nation, Smart Card offers high school students laminated plastic cards that display their academic, attendance and citizenship records. When students apply for jobs, they can use the card as a kind of resume and letter of recommendation, said district Supt. Rudy M.

Target Corp., the third-largest U.S. discount retailer, said it will become the first store in the country to offer its customers credit cards with computer chips. Target, in an alliance with Visa USA, will issue the "smart" cards through its subsidiary, Retailers National Bank, later this year. The company will install special terminals that can read information off the chip in all 990 Target stores next year.

U.S. Treasury officials are planning a crackdown on so-called prepaid cards, an increasingly popular payment instrument, to help safeguard the financial system from a surge in money laundering and other crimes including terrorist financing. The officials outlined plans for a regulatory clampdown on the instruments, also known as stored-value cards, at an anti-money-laundering conference in Hollywood, Fla.

An AT&T Corp. executive said Friday that Federal Communications Commission staff would recommend the company be cited for failing to pay as much as $500 million in fees on use of prepaid calling cards. AT&T says the cards should be exempt from the fees. But FCC staff members disagree, said Robert Quinn, an AT&T vice president who handles government relations.