Yesterday Consult Hyperion’s Dave Birch paid a visit to Glenbrook World HQ here in Menlo Park. We talked payments, consulting, emerging markets, and blogging. But the highlight was our test of his UK issued contactless payment sticker at the 7-Eleven next to our office. It worked!

You have to be a hardcore contactless geek to understand why that’s significant. Here’s a quick explanation:Visa and MasterCard outside the US have an EMV-based standard for contactless, separate from the magnetic stripe-based standard used in the US. The sticker that Dave had stuck to his iPhone was issued in the UK but using the US standard, because the European standard doesn’t currently work in stickers (because it needs the contact chip interface to access the EMV parameters).

Here’s the photographic evidence:

Dave Birch paying with his Prepay Technologies contactless sticker at the 7-Eleven near Glenbrook.