[trjordan]

So, this is cool, but...

Why do you have to have a smartphone to do this? If you're going to get businesses on board and use photo IDs to verify every transaction, why not just have the signup process be a webcam and a form?

There's a couple of cool usability things you can do with a smartphone (proximity pushes users that are there to the top of the list in case of name conflicts, whether it's from geofencing, manual inputs, or side-channel geo info), but the basic idea of registering for a store doesn't seem that novel. Why not slap a decent search UI on it and give all the cashiers iPads?

Is this idea so novel that nobody thought you could look up a name and photo via the web at point of sale before today? And if the idea isn't novel, why hasn't anybody successfully executed it?

[dasil003]

Because you don't want a bunch of stores to be able to charge to your account when you're not there.