Visa Team Holds Smart Card Tryouts

<H1> Visa Team Holds Smart Card Tryouts</H1> Joining the race to implement smart card technology, Visa U.S.A. has teamed up with First Union Corporation, NationsBank and Wachovia to distribute stored-value cards during the Olympic games.

The chip cards are available to visitors in Atlanta and hold cash denominations of $10, $20, $50 and $100. Visitors can purchase the cards at banks, card dispensing machines and at select merchants in Atlanta. More than 1,500 local merchants, including fast food outlets, convenience stores, movie theaters and gas stations, are accepting the cards. Visa, meanwhile, is expecting to roll out the cards to other cities as well.

<H1>Plugging In Without Getting Tied Up</H1>Whether you work out of an amenity-deficient hotel room, crowded business center or someone else's home, the era of looking for hidden phone jacks under furniture or staring helplessly at inaccessible modem ports may be over.

IBM will offer a relatively cheap solution (price is estimated to be under $200) later this year when it rolls out a cordless modem. The device, unveiled at PC Expo earlier this summer, requires no hardware or software changes to your Mac- or PC-based operating system. It can operate within a 100 feet of a phone jack and support modem speeds of up to 28.8 kbps. To install, simply attach a card-like unit to the computer and a companion base device to the nearest phone jack.

Once in place, "you can e-mail and surf the Web without rearranging furniture to accommodate the nearest phone outlet," said Bill Pence, director of networking and IO communications, IBM Research.

To find out more, access the company's research division on the Web at http://www.research.ibm.com.