The cash-free vending machine is making a comeback. A company called Isochron will be installing cashless vending machines in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport this year. The hype around cashless vending machines started back in the dot-com era when everything was going digital and virtual. The idea took a hike along with thousands of other dot-com schemes once the bubble burst. But now it is The cash-free vending machine is making a comeback. A company called Isochron will be installing cashless vending machines in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport this year.The hype around cashless vending machines started back in the dot-com era when everything was going digital and virtual. The idea took a hike along with thousands of other dot-com schemes once the bubble burst. But now it is back and this time it may stick around. Isochron worked with SkyeTek, an RFID technology company, to install RFID readers in the airport’s Coke machines. If you have a credit card with an embedded RFID chip, the reader in the vending machine downloads all your pertinent info and dispenses the soda. Between 15 percent and 20 percent of all credit cards now have RFID embedded, says Rob Balgley, CEO at SkyTek, and the number is climbing rapidly.I asked Balgley, doesn’t it cost the distributing company more to process a credit card payment than cash, and on a $1.00 item, does it really pay to do that? His answer surprised me. “The increase in revenue is substantial where smart cards can be used for incidental purchases, less than $5. Revenue goes up 30 percent to 40 percent,” Balgley said.Why? Simple. Coca-Cola now has a lot of information about you and can offer you all kinds of promotional incentives to buy more. Imagine walking up to some anonymous Coke machine and waving your credit card in front of it only to see displayed on the LCD screen a personal message: “Hello, Joe, I see you’re buying another drink? That’s your tenth today. Maybe you should try our diet soda or you might put on a few pounds.”Well of course it will never say that but there might be a promotion that buys back every eighth drink.The possibilities are endless. Imagine a criminal on the run tracked down by following his trail of Coke purchases across the country.Speaking of criminals, what if someone steals your card? You might literally be nickeled and dimed to death. Those small change purchases can add up.A cashless vending machine will also absolutely allow the vendor to easily up the price. When it was a strictly cash business, vendors had to consider that having the right change was part of the purchase decision. Now, the vendor can up the price by any odd number they choose. Finally, if my bank is embedding an RFID chip in my credit card I want to know about it. I could be walking by dozens of RFID readers all of which are picking up my credit card information.As this InfoWorld video shows, hacking RFID, for things such as making cloned access cards, is in the wild. Technology Industry