Meeting Mike Abbott

We recently talked about the change in Credit Card Processing that is using NFC (Near Field Communication) to transfer payments from our phone to payment stations at all the retail stores of Walgreens, WalMart, CVS, Macy’s and others.

I had the luck this past week to meet Mike Abbott the CEO of SoftCard who came up with the idea and the technology that was incorporated into all the modern payment systems.

He is a graduate of Stony Brook University, he gave a talk on How Did I “DoIT” series which we are running to show the students, faculty, and staff on the campus how Innovators can change the world.

His talk was dynamic and engaging. He discussed how failures happen to us all, his first was at IBM when he was in their WATSON research area that noticed the need for routing TCP/IP long before the Internet of today but when they presented this to the Higher Ups at IBM they didn’t want to pursue this direction.  His colleagues all left and went to CISCO, he was then forced to find a new direction but this failure became the path to his success in finance and banking.

I encourage you all to look him up, he is one of the most influencial people that has changed our world but you may never know.

Thanks for a great talk Mike.

David