James S. A. Corey's Leviathan Wakes

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The 2011 novel Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey describes a futuristic world where humans have colonized much of the solar system. Nearly everyone in this future world carries a hand terminal. The characters use the hand terminal for communications, entertainment, commercial transactions, and access to information networks. (Corey, 2011) It’s quite possible that Corey’s hand terminal is closer in function to our contemporary mobile devices than our “smartphones” are to the cellular telephones first offered by Motorola in 1983. Forty years after the sale of the first handheld mobile phone, the devices had grown to include access to the Internet, cameras, Bluetooth, near field communication, and vast library of software.
Among the most recently added features is the option to pay for goods and services using your mobile device. The feature was first available in 2011 with Google Wallet; however, it failed to gain traction in the market. Its many points of failure included the mobile service carriers who sell the devices. One major problem was that it was yet another piece of the very complex string of players involved in payment processing. All of those players had at least some cause to block the service. …show more content…

The difference was that Apple tapped into frustrations over the rather antiquated magnetic stripe system and offered banks the chance to build a new payment system. From the start, Apple Pay capitalized on the points where Google Wallet had failed. Some of that may have simply been due to Apple’s influence and the ubiquity of the iPhone. (Popper, 2014) Google was able to rebound in 2015 with Android Pay. The new system was nearly identical to Apple Pay except that it had a more user-friendly interface and it integrated with rewards cards from the very beginning. Additionally, Google was able to support Android pay on devices from multiple manufactures, including many older devices. (Swider,

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