e-wallet

A portable personal profile that stores a user's shipping address, billing address, and credit card information in one secure place. The idea is to have only one "e-wallet," so that a user can make purchases across a variety of Web sites without having to reenter a bunch of information (see: sticky content).

It is interesting to note that when a technology or concept such as this emerges, the companies involved (and there are many) must adopt a standard to which they all will conform (otherwise, the technology may not gain acceptance). The emerging standard for this technology is ECML but overall, PayPal continues to dominate the online payment industry, however Google Wallet is taking advantage of the cloud.

Historical perspective: In August 2012, Google announced a version of its mobile payments app Google Wallet that allows users to load any major U.S. credit or debit card to your smartphone. It's cloud-based, meaning it's all stored online, just like Amazon and other shopping sites store your credit card data. In that same month, Starbucks became the first national chain to allow customers to pay for their purchases with the mobile-payments app Square. 

In 2010, we heard from The Boston Globe that anyone who has ever overdrawn a bank account could soon be in the market for a product being developed at MIT's Media Lab. Called the "proverbial wallet," it literally becomes more difficult to open as its owner's bank account runs low on money. The "magnetized" wallet uses embedded technology to connect to the owner's bank account via Bluetooth.

By the end of 2014, Apple Pay was released and blockchain emerged as a major online ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or other cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly. PayPal made it possible for online vendors to accept bitcoin payments via partnerships with Coinbase, BitPay and GoCoin, marking its first step toward embracing the crypto market.