Who to blame? Banks, according to one transit official, who told The New York Times yesterday that lack of distribution of NFC-enabled cards means that the MetroCard won't go completely out of service until 2019:

“We originally thought that these contactless cards, distributed by banks, would be widely distributed and in wide use today,” Michael DeVitto, executive vice president in charge of fare collection for New York City Transit, told the authority’s committee on capital program oversight on Monday. “That’s not the case.”

And so we're all doomed to spend another six years calculating how many dollars to add to our regular MetroCards if we're ever going to run the balance down to zero.

(flickr/mjtmail)

Firms specializing in technology security make it their business to scare potential customers, but that doesn't make an Internet Identity (IID) report predicting cyber doom in 2014, highlighted today by Ray Kurzweil's Accelerating Intelligence, any less spooky.

According to IID, looming cybersecurity threats in 2013--more mobile malware, increasingly aggressive hacktivism, attacks on the cloud--are "well-anticipated and mundane."

Those "mundane" threats are nothing next to the bleak wasteland of death and destruction IID expects in 2014:

[By] 2014 significant new methods of cybercrime will emerge. These new threats include the utilization of Internet connected devices to actually carry out physical crimes, including murders and cybercriminals leveraging mobile device Near Field Communications (NFC) to wreak havoc with banking and e-commerce. IID also expects the industry to combat such threats with new platforms for sharing intelligence across researchers, commercial enterprises and government agencies.

IID elaborated on "Murder By Internet Connected Devices" with scenarios that sound pretty plausible. They predicted that criminals could use pacemakers with remote connections, control systems on Internet-connected vehicles or even connected machines that control IV drips to potentially carry out long-distance, untraceable crimes.

It sounds like hyperbole, but pacemakers (for example) are already hackable, and as Forbes noted in this early December post about the reality of compromised medical equipment, Homeland has already used a hacked pacemaker as a plot device.

IID also warned about the dangers of NFC-enabled smart phones. NFC, or near-field communication, allows information exchange between compatible devices. It's pretty common on phones now but may one day even permit cars to talk to each other. Paul Ferguson, the company's vice president of Threat Intelligence, says NFC could be "a gold mine for cybercriminals and we have already seen evidence that they are working to leverage these apps to siphon money."

Additional threats IID believes may manifest in 2014 include an increase in state-sponsored malware, like Stuxnet, Flame and Duqu, a successful cyberattack on a power grid and an "exploit of a significant military assault system like drones."

Not directly mentioned but already in the wild: hackers already taking advantage of poorly-secured supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems which have easily cracked web administration pages. At the moment SCADA vulnerabilities might just cause discomfort and disruption, but in 2014's creepy killer web scenario, compromising a large-scale heating and cooling system might just be round one in an all-out infrastructure attack on a regional, even a national scale.

In posting a link to the Kurzweil write-up about IID's dire warnings, Quartz's Christopher Mims sounded the necessary note of caution needed after reading hints of a looming cyber-pocalypse:

Cybercriminals will straight-up kill you, says firm that profits massively by hyping threat. kurzweilai.net/murder-by-inte…

— Christopher Mims (@mims) January 4, 2013

Duly noted. However, if IID is correct, we've only got a year.

Cower and whimper accordingly.

The future! (Wikipedia)

A report from WNYC's New Tech City indicates that in addition to driving themselves, our cars may one day be able to have conversations, as well. New Tech City's Manoush Zomorodi questioned Transportation Nation's Alex Goldmark in the clip below and Mr. Goldmark said the future is in machines using Near-Field Communication (NFC) to communicate via shortwave.

Mr. Goldmark's description of life with machines chattering around us sounds great, on the surface:

We're going to be seeing a world where things talk to each other and make a lot of the decisions faster and quicker than we humans ever could. We're going to have cars that are speaking on these basically shortwave radio conversations with the stoplight saying "Hey, I'm coming up here." That's going to be talking to the train coming down the way and saying "Hold on." The car may even know how to break ahead of time.

Mr. Goldmark goes on to report that the city of Ann Arbor, MI has begun testing cars with NFC just to see how they handle daily urban traffic use.

You can listen to the conversation between Ms. Zomorodi and Mr. Goldmark below.

We're already hoping our cars will eventually go from friendly proximity warnings to smack-talking and finger-gesturing protocols as well.

Barnes and Noble's flagship. (flickr.com/edenpictures)

Yesterday Barnes & Noble announced a splashy Microsoft partnership, complete with major cash infusion. Today, Fortune has a Q&A with CEO William Lynch, speculating on how the bookseller can leverage NFC technologies. Whatever its eventual fate, this company seems damned determined that if there's an obituary involved, it will not read like those of Borders.

Asked what the Nook business could've done better, Mr. Lynch suggested the company still has a lot of opportunity in "offline-online integration" and that if they had more time, he would "try to figure out how to unlock cool experiences." His perfect example?

We're going to start embedding NFC chips into our Nooks. We can work with the publishers so they would ship a copy of each hardcover with an NFC chip embedded with all the editorial reviews they can get on BN.com. And if you had your Nook, you can walk up to any of our pictures, any our aisles, any of our bestseller lists, and just touch the book, and get information on that physical book on your Nook and have some frictionless purchase experience.

He wouldn't commit to any particular timing, however.

You know what they say: There's no fervor like the converted.

Getting Googley.

Near field communication is now as near as our friend to the south and east. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced today that Google Wallet would be partnering with NJ Transit, the third largest transit system in the country.

TechCrunch says commuters with Nexus S 4Gs with be able to use their phones to pay for tickets with a whoosh (a swish? a swipe? did we decide on something here?) of their phones . The list of  locations where you can use it includes ticket booths and windows at New York's Penn Station and the train station at Newark Airport, as well as the  6, 43, 80, 81, 87, and 120 bus routes.

This couldn't have happened earlier? Like Saturday when Betabeat was stuck in line between two grown men dressed as Mario and Luigi trying to buy a ticket Northeast Corridor, Trenton Local (Hi, mom!) Now if only they could find a way to make Penn Station look like less of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Mr. King.

Betabeat has a new internet bank to dote on now that BankSimple has abandoned us for the City of Roses. Movenbank is a New York-based personal banking service that uses near field communication--the same technology as Google Wallet--to remove the cards and the wallet from banking transactions and replace them with your phone. Founder Brett King, an Aussie based in New York and London, rode the success of his book, Bank 2.0, and his experience with his boutique consultancy firm User Strategy, to start up a bank with "No paper. No plastic. No hidden fees." The bank is launching its first product, a Mint-esque personal finance profile based on social data, on October 1 and plans to roll out the financial services over the summer.

Alpha users can sign up for Movenbank with Facebook and turn over the keys to their Twitter accounts, Klout scores and other sites where users maintain a rating of some sort; customers will not connect their bank accounts until later in the company's development. Eventually, Movenbank will look at factors such as social connections in order to determine who gets a credit line.

"Think of it as a product like foursquare or Klout initially, but around your financial life," Mr. King said. "Wherein a typical bank might say--you come to them, and you say you want a credit card--and you're a customer with a score of say 580, the bank's going to say 'no, you're marginal, you're too high-risk.' But we might give them a card based on other things. Say they have 10,000 friends on Facebook and Twitter. We'll say okay, they have high influence--we should probably pay this guy to get access to his friends list!"

Movenbank raised "quite a big funding round" from an Asia-based investor about a year ago, Mr. King said, and has eight full-time employees in its Midtown office as well as part-time and contract workers in the U.K. and Asia. They decided to go with NFC because "clearly that's the way things are going to go," Mr. King said. Bank of America is installing 18 NFC-enabled ATMs in New York and Citibank is also implementing the technology "on a fairly large scale," he said.

Betabeat noticed that Movenbank's blog is rife with mentions of its more famous and now West Coast-based cousin, Banksimple--a surprise since startups often like to pretend their competitors don't exist. "My pals at BankSimple soft launched their debit cards internally for their staff this week, which is big news because it signifies the acceleration of the big shift in the BANK 2.0 landscape," Mr. King wrote on Sept. 20.

The BankSimple launch is significant for a number of reasons. First of all, when was the last time you heard of a new bank having 50,000 customers signed up or registered before the bank launched?? Secondly, the fact that BankSimple doesn’t have a banking license of their own, is no hindrance in offering better banking service today. Lastly, if you are going to change an industry, be prepared for some resistance.

"We're big fans of what they're doing," Mr. King said. "From our perspective the more reform that takes place in this space the better. We're creating a new mode of banking so it's actually in our interest to work together in that rather than be strong competitors ... if Banksimple is successful that adds credibility."

Movenbank is still negotiating with partner banks who will power the financial backend, the same way Banksimple works. The company has a few thousand subscribers signed up, Mr. King said.

Movenbank and Banksimple might be considered allies in a fight to disrupt the personal banking industry. Both startups have run into the same problems with an entrenched and unpopular system--both originally wanted to charter their own banks, but found the process too time-consuming, complex and uncertain. Movenbank, which just started building a product in the beginning of this year, can look to Banksimple for some of the challenges it might face ahead: the (now) Portland-based company's launch dragged on as it struggled with the pressures of its ambitious task, losing its lead engineer in May, which was around the time it was supposed to launch.

Card Cases stores your credit card info so that after swiping once with participating merchants, you can start a "tab" and pay with just a tap of your iPhone, iPad, or Android device. On the merchant side, businesses can use Square Register to spit out digital receipts, check daily transactions, and basically automate the checkout experience. On its quarterly earnings call, Mr. Donahoe said PayPal plans on targeting those same offline point-of-sale transactions.By the end of the year, PayPal will be testing the integration with "a major U.S. brick and mortar retailer," says Forbes, with 20 national retailers expected by 2012. On the earnings call, Mr. Donahoe said:

“In this new retail world, consumers expect a seamless experience across physical stores, mobile, laptops or any Internet-connected device. In this new world, physical stores become just another point of access. Location alone is not enough. It’s not an advantage.”

Of course going after the offline market is trickier than all the seamless, frictionless rhetoric makes it sound. This early in the game, it isn't always a faster than swiping a credit card or pulling out cash. This month, PayPal announced an Android service that lets users pay by tapping two phones together using near-field communications (NFC) technology. But on the call, Mr. Donahoe said one merchant referred to NFC as "Not for Commerce" because of problems with getting it to work.

GRUMPY INCUMBENTS. Mobile payments sure make people catty. PayPal sent Betabeat several explicit and unsolicited statements about Google's announcement of its NFC-chipped phone, including: "As the mobile payment leader (we expect $2  billion in payment volume to transact over mobile devices via PayPal in 2011), we'd be happy to comment. Put simply--before you try mobile (or any other payments) solution, you need to be great at payments.  There is so much more than just technology involved to get payments right. Above all (and this is something that many tech pundits simply forget), any new solution must deliver something better than the existing way to do it. Not just different... better."

Visa chose to blog its disapproval. "It is certainly news that Google is getting in the game by testing a new payment service… something that we’ve been doing around the world for the past couple of years.  But I’d remind you that launching NFC payments in the U.S. this year was just one small aspect of our recent announcement regarding Visa’s plan to provide a global, comprehensive solution enabling consumers to transact wherever, whenever by using a card, a computer or a mobile device which kicks off later this year."

HOW TO GET A TECHNICAL CO-FOUNDER. Baitr.co by Aussie/SF developer Peter Watts was one of the simplest but stickiest hacks that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt. A fake splash page with animation that spins a user's email address into space, it pokes fun at the LaunchRock phenomenon that inspired a slew of splash pages that collect alpha and beta users for pre-launch start-ups that often never hatch. Mr. Watts got laughs, kudos and an interview with TechCrunch out of the joke, and now he's had a compelling job offer, transmitted via his About.me page:

im looking for a co-founder. i cannot code at all. sorry... while writing notes on my pre beta page, i stumbled on the TC article. i started laughing. how co-incidental. This is one. I believe in random co incidents. If you are in SF like your page says you are, that is more awesome. 2 Your linkedin further confirmed that you are took part in building something to catalog music. you also took some psych classes. this is 3. I want to build the best music startup in the world. With the sickest, most ridiculous marketing campaign. Im taking a leap of faith and saying that we should meet and talk. Hope to hear from you peter.

Mr. Watts was very excited to receive the communique, but it seems he's decided to pass on this one.

YOUR MOM IS NOW ON GROUP BUYING. A site, possibly Daily Deals for Moms, going by the pseudonym GroupMoms just emailed Betabeat about some embargoed news. "Think Groupon meets Avon--only better. The site, which empowers moms to source and promote daily deals, has been around for about a year but is announcing a round of funding this week." Oh wait, this already exists (PlumDistrict, $8.5 million), and exists (CafeMom, $24 million) and probably exists some more, but one can only Google "daily mom deals" for so long. "This round of funding will allow the company to expand its network and enable Group-moms to take on Groupon," the company says. They're based in San Francisco, but the CEO is based out of New York, and the company will use this round of funding to expand to New York.

NEXT. "First day of my last two weeks at work," charity:water devlopment officer Lane Wood Twttrd today. Moving on to better things? He's not sure, but took pains to say there's no drama here. "I’m not storming out nor am I getting pushed out. I won’t feel awkward when I come back to visit, and I will remain close with many of the people I have worked with... I remain your biggest fan," he wrote on Tumblr. Meanwhile, charity:water is big time hiring. "We've got plenty of open tech/web jobs," digital director Paul Young tweeted today.

PETER THIEL IN JEANS, T-SHIRT AND MONOCOLE IN NEW JERSEY. OR NOT. "Holy shit a billionare just walked past me," local entrepreneur Frank Denbow said today on Twttr. "Peter Thiel. Nobody gives a shit." Founder Michael LaVelle jumped in quickly with a "RT @billionaire: Holy shit I just walked past @FrankDenbow!"

This is a public test of some bleeding edge stuff Foursquare has been working on for a while. As note in the blog post, "NFC is, obviously, a long way from being available everywhere and in all phones, but we’re excited by some of the potential."

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley has a history with Google, which acquired and eventually shut down his first location based service, Dodgeball. The appearance of Foursquare at this conference, instead of Google's homegrown Latitude service, has SAI's Dan Frommer speculating about a reunion between the two.

The next generation of smartphones will most likely include technology that would enable mobile payments. Google is already planning trials of NFC payment systems, shouldering the cost of installing special readers at thousands of merchant locations.

Now NY1 is reporting that the city is looking to institute similar technology in place of the current Metrocard system.

This could act as a much needed catalyst, giving the average New Yorker a chance to get comfortable with what might seem at first like an alien practice, using their phones as mobile wallets.

As Erick Schonfeld points out, consumer behavior and lack of infrastructure are the two biggest challenges facing widespread deployment of NFC. Backing from big, powerful entities like Google and city government would go a long way towards addressing those obstacles.

Betabeat is imagining a future of checking in to the subway, with special rewards for dutiful F train riders.