In its fifth year partnering with the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco this past weekend, PayPal let attendees try out a bold payment concept—the RFID festival wristband.
The bracelet acts as a festival ticket, but can also be loaded with money via PayPal, letting festival attendees make payments with the flick of a wrist. For this weekend’s festival, all participating food and drink vendors accepting the wearable payment option, and a couple of vendors only accepted cashless payments. Outside Lands organizers also sweetened the deal by adding $5.00 in their Bison Bucks credits for every $75 a user loaded onto her wristband.
It’s a pretty new payment concept, and one that major companies have lately been exploring, occasionally with a biometric authentication aspect too, as with the Nymi Band payment trials. And it certainly isn’t unheard-of for the time-worn concept of the concert wristband to be injected with new technological capabilities, as can be seen in 2014’s Lightwave wearable, designed by a DJ to let her track the biometric responses of her audience. Now, with alternative payment concepts like mPayments starting to catch on, digital wristband wallets could become a more popular solution for festival attendees interested in leaving their wallets and payment cards at home.
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