Money with ringtones. (Image by Sakartvelo.)

Don Dodge of Mircosoft and Google fame has a post on his blog in which he predicts the most significant tech developments of the next ten years. He won’t be proved right in every case, but I’d be surprised if the prediction I’ve excerpted below didn’t pan out. (Thanks to Newmark’s Door.)

“Cell phone as payment device – Your credit card is just a piece of plastic that can do nothing by itself. The magnetic strip on the back must be read by a card reader and transmitted digitally to a server in the cloud. How quaint credit cards will seem 10 years from now. Your cell phone is already digitally connected to the cloud. You can authenticate yourself in a variety of ways. Your cell phone is with you all the time, even more so than your credit cards. Other countries are already using cell phones as payment devices. The USA will catch up in the next decade, and develop many new uses.”