Instead of carrying around a dozen credit cards, Chameleon Networks would like for you to carry around their new device, the ‘Pocket Vault’, roughly the size of a dozen credit cards. Besides its amazing space saving ability, the Pocket Vault rewrites a single ‘Chameleon Card’, allowing you to encode it with your personal credit information and the like, effectively turning it into any one of a number of machine-readable cards. This is more convenient than removing the card from your wallet, I’m told.
But just when I hate this thing, they have to go and do something ingenious, in two parts: first, by requiring a biometric authorization to use the device (a simple thumbprint scan — before you get freaked out, think of it as practice for shopping at Satan’s grocery store) and by making the Chameleon Card lose its ‘imprint’ after about ten minutes, they have single-handedly cockblocked most opportunity for physical credit card theft. Add to that the ability to backup your data on your computer (good!) or online (bad!), and you’ve got a pretty great device, which I’ll buy as soon as they install one inside of piece of folding leather that also holds money and personal identification. Unless I can print those, too.
