Get rid of my wallet - who's working on mobile identification?

The George Costanza Wallet

Every time I leave to go anywhere, I do the "pat-down".  Guys, you know what I'm talking about.  Patting your pockets checking for "keys, wallet, cellphone".

My mobile phone has already replaced my contact list, camera, video camera, and even my laptop to a certain extent - if it could just replace my wallet and my keys I would only have to leave the house with one item.

Keys are a done deal - in 5 years new cars won't ship with keys, you will press a button on your phone to unlock and start your car.

That leaves the wallet.  People are hard at work solving the mobile payment problem.  In fact, it is already working to some extent - you can buy your coffee with the Starbucks App and even by Gas in boulder via your phone using Mocha Pay.

The one I don't see anyone working on is Mobile Identification.  My wallet serves two purposes: payments and ID (drivers license).  Even if the payment problem is solved, without a mobile identification card on my phone, I'll still have to grab my wallet every time before I leave the house.  And this scares me because as we all know nothing moves slower than government, and nothing moves slower in government that the identification division - how long was your last wait at the DMV?

The one ray of hope is that I can get my boarding pass on my mobile phone, but I still need to show my drivers license.

So in the words of American Express - "What's in your wallet?" - hopefully the answer in the near future will be "what wallet?"    

Smart phone with unlimited voice, text, and internet - for free!

Sound to good to be true?  This new smart phone will cost you about $200, but after you buy it you will never pay another bill again.  What is this "to good to be true" device?  It's the new iPod touch:

 Last week Apple announced that the new iPod touch will support Facetime, which means you can "call" anyone with an iPod touch, iPhone, and other soon to be supported smartphones - for free.  No monthly bills or contracts.  This is a huge step in the "no cell service" movement, which I'm a big fan of.

The free text messaging come courtesy of TextFree.  This is an application that gives you a fake phone number, and allows you to send and receive unlimited text messages from the phone number.

The only catch?  That it can only be used over Wi-Fi.  But think about it, how often are you away from a Wi-Fi hotspot?  You have it at your house, your friends home, your work, the bank, the grocery store.  About the only place you don't have a Wi-Fi connection is your car, and you can possibly pull over a find a neighbor with an open router.

You can extend your free phone calling reach to 500 Million people by installing the Skype App.  Need to call landlines and other mobile numbers?  No problem, Skype let's you call unlimited phones for $3 a month.

You can even get your own unlimited inbound phone number through Skype, for about $6.  Thus for $9 a month you can have a mobile device that does everything that cutting edge smart phones do, and it will cost you 10% of the monthly price.

I think something that the most excited and little scary implication of all this is kids.  Now any kid can save their allowance and have an instant smartphone with unlimited talk, text, internet and video chat, for just $200!  No monthly fees & no monthly contract.  This also means no parental controls, no call or text logs, or tracking!  Yikes!  It's time to treat every iPod just like a phone, because it is one.

What do you think?  Are you ready to ditch the cell phone and the monthly contracts?