Chase, Visa and Mastercard have closed down their smartcard trial on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the NYT reports today. It also says Mondex has closed its Swindon trial. The problem in NY is that the system was too cumbersome to use, needing special readers that were not always up to snuff, compared to the familiar and reliable system for credit cards. Bribing users with start up cash didn't work either. No one ever reloaded their cards. Not all merchants took them, especially those handling only cash transactions. Also, the cards could not be used outside the trial area, and the paper says, "everybody leaves the Upper West Side," without saying where they go to kill time for the day like out of work Koreans who dare not admit the sublimity of being jobless at long last -- money cannot buy the joy. Spokespersons say that they misjudged the customer's desire for cash-like freedom and anonymity (my words). That the best prospect for smartcard future lies in captive users such as college campuses and the military where they expect an all-purpose card will catch on by providing handy ID and money, as well as (unsaid) perfect monitoring and data-gathering. I'll keep my $12-balance card (never found a place to accept it) on the chance that it will be a valuable collector's item for the Edsel Electronic Opium Museum. And we never leave the Upper West Side, well, once, to go to the Harvard Club for a swell DCSNY. Great group, grim dump.