Well there are tons of interesting tech work done in China, targeting only Chinese market though :) its a self contained market

I can walk around and pay for everything with my cellphone nowadays in China, but can't really do that in Bay Area.

> I can walk around and pay for everything with my cellphone nowadays in China, but can't really do that in Bay Area.

Is this really that interesting though? Tell me when they have self-driving cars that are affordable enough for ride sharing.

That's just an example that i find interesting enough, that quite a few US companies tried to solve, but still have a long way to go.

As for self-driving cars, Chinese companies like Baidu are not unlike Google, and they are investing/researching heavily in these fields. The only twist is that self-driving in China would be a lot harder to solve because the roads are a lot messy there :) At the same time, many of these companies directly invests in US companies as well

>That's just an example that i find interesting enough, that quite a few US companies tried to solve, but still have a long way to go.

Because it's not a technical problem. Nobody cares about the ability to pay with their phone in the US when a credit card works so well and doesn't have a battery that dies.

Android and Apple pay work perfectly fine but almost nobody in my tech circles feels the urge to use them, let alone normal citizens. The credit card infrastructure in the US is so prevalent and reliable that there needs to be some serious perks to unseat the dominance.

Spoken as the incumbent. Of course it's a technical problem, as least as much as other SV companies. Hard tech hasn't been the edge for SV for many decades and it's getting even less important today. All the big companies has tried to tackle payments, but with lackluster results. What's "perfectly fine" for the US isn't in most of the rest of the world. Some of the more prominent startups in the UK, Germany and Sweden are payment related exactly because SV is weak in this area. There's a great opportunity for Chinese companies here if they ever decide to go outside their own borders.

It's almost as if different places have different cultures, social norms, and ways of doing things. Nah. That couldn't be it.

I don't see how that is adding anything to the discussion. If you want to be the leader you actually have to lead. You have to be the one that figures out "the future" and have the solution people didn't know they wanted before other people do. The "perks" of mobile payments should be fairly obvious to anyone who has experienced it, I suspect you and the parent just aren't one of those people. No one is going to stop the US to remain dysfunctional in infrastructure, but it still has a price.

My (admittedly snarky) point was that there are clear differences between countries in their preferences for payment systems that can't be chalked up to "dysfunctional infrastructure." And it's not a US vs. rest of world thing. Even across Europe there are clear differences in cash vs. debit card vs. credit card vs. etc. acceptance. And stored value cards (for use outside of transit systems) seems mostly to be an Asian thing. I have certainly used mobile phone payments in Europe where chip without PIN can sometimes be a bit of a pain because it's not part of the normal checkout process. In the US, I find just using a credit card is a bit easier even if I know a store accepts mobile payments.

Something like WeChat really isn't like cards though. It's more like cash, cards and bank transfers in one. Like if most everyone would accept Paypal for everything without fees and it was integrated everywhere (web, store, phone, chat etc).