I use a lot of smart things: the Chrome browser on my laptop that can predict with fairly remarkable precision what site I want to visit next based on what else I’ve been up to on the web; my roommate’s Wii which mimics my real-life movement and allows me to swing fearlessly at an oncoming pitch on the TV screen as if I were still playing softball in high school; the Snif Tag on my Dog’s collar that lets me check on his activity while I’m at work and he’s tearing my favorite black shoes apart at home; my Jetta that automatically recognizes weather conditions and tweaks tire traction accordingly; my iPhone that allows me to do everything from change remotely what music is being played on the Mac in my bedroom while I’m in the kitchen to locate where I can buy Gola sneakers from the UK in the outskirts of Boston. So, please, inform me again why contactless payment cards are so “smart”?

Take some advice from the demise of the Razr (yes, those flimsy phones are still around – although Motorola probably makes nothing off from them), which tweaked the basic shape of the mobile phone and made them look “cool.” That revolutionary slim and cool phone kept users sticky until an only slightly-higher priced phone with real capabilities entered the market (*cough, the iPhone). Likewise, placing a chip in a payment card that allows consumers to wave instead of swipe is simply a tweak to the basic shape of payment. And while it may be “cool,” it’s apparently not cool enough to on-board consumers. It hasn’t offered a compelling enough proposition to merchants, either. And, more important, let’s be honest – it’s really not smart!

An article in ComputerWorld earlier this week, “New Credit Cards Show Their Smarts,” outlined new security features for contactless payment cards that were on display at the Cartes & IDentification show in Paris. I had the opportunity to work with David Evans on his keynote presentation for that show for the CEOs of the leading smart card companies. Instead of focusing on how smart cards can provide added security to an already fairly secure payment system, David suggested that smart card technologists start focusing on actually making smart cards for payment smart by embracing payments data, cloud computing and cultivating a community of developers to advance innovation. As he suggested, smart cards can have a future place in the sixth revolution of payments if they do this. Imagine if your payment device alerted you when you walked near a store that was having some great sales. As an entrepreneurial MIT engineer and tech-savvy colleague of mine noted, this is totally possible. He offered a primitive example: each time someone makes a purchase, the smart card could send that information to the cloud. If flocks of people were making purchases at that same store and that information was sent up to the cloud, the cloud could then disseminate back down to my payment device that all this activity is occurring, perhaps vibrating when I pass by that same store and alerting me that a lot of purchases are being made there. Now, that is smart.

So will the dynamically changing code on a display on the new contactless payment cards make them more appealing to consumers? Perhaps for a select few when they make online purchase (which, by the way, make up only something like 3.5% of retail sales). Even then there are some killer alternative payment providers out there like Bill Me Later, which not only makes online purchases more secure, but removes the hassle of typing in a swarm of digits and offers me more flexible financing. If anything, these new smart cards are simply an example of how smart card innovation in the payments space has fallen short, keeping leaders in industry who have invested in the technology sticky, and not us consumers.