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Tag Archive: Visa

The $23 Quadrillion Pack Of Cigarettes

The $23 Quadrillion Pack Of Cigarettes

How much you pay for cigarettes depends on where you live. But there’s nowhere on Earth that charges $23 quadrillion – that’s $23,148,855,308,184,500, to be precise – a pack.

But thanks to a computer error, that’s how much a New Hampshire man paid at a gas station using his pre-paid Visa card. When he checked his balance online later he discovered the amount – plus the $15 bank fee for being overdrawn, just to add insult to injury.

Josh Muszynski told TV station WMUR:

"I thought somebody had bought Europe with my credit card."

Visa Advertises On Facebook

Social networks are thought of as being for individuals, but Facebook has around 80,000 small businesses with profiles on the site. That’s an untapped market, which may be why Visa has just given Facebook $2 million in order to advertise and reach those small enterprises.

The ads are for Visa’s online service, which is intended to help small businesses run more efficiently. And to give an incentive to participants, Visa is giving a $100 ad credit to the first 20,000 businesses to download its service via the social network, the BBC reports.

Visa Plans Phased Launch of Mobile Wallets

Visa Plans Phased Launch of Mobile Wallets

Credit giant Visa (which recently announced a global restructuring which will create a new publicly traded company) has announced a tiered rollout of its mobile payment system designed to enable consumers to make charges and manage accounts via mobile phones and other wireless devices.

Visa has been testing and developing the system for years with several partners (including IBM, VeriSign, Nokia, and others), and similar systems have seen limited trials, including mobile payment systems in Germany and Finland which enable mobile phone users to pay for public transit. The basic idea is to convert mobile phones and other wireless devices into mobile wallets which can be used much like credit cards: when consumers make a purchase, they swipe the phone or other device over a reader which detects a microchip embedded in the device. Owners then confirm the purchase, and the transaction is complete.

Visa Toys With Credit Card Displays

About 10 percent of Visa’s 1.2 billion credit and debit cards in use worldwide already have a built-in computer chip, and that proportion is growing rapidly, Arnold says. The chip can store information that could be displayed on a small screen running across the top of a card, in a position similar to the magnetic strip on the back of most cards today.

Visa expects to have produced working prototypes of the devices in about a year’s time, Arnold says, although with security and other technology issues still to be ironed out, it’s likely to be a few years before such cards become widely available. In addition, the LCD-like screens being used in early designs are too fragile for everyday use, Arnold says.

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