If you’ve recently visited Melbourne or Sydney, you might have already ben exposed to a bar or restaurant that doesn’t allow you to set ‘run a tab’.

Instead, an increasing number of venues are using mobile phone apps and Near Field Communication (NFC) functionality to ‘Pay and Go’ in a similar way to credit cards with smart chips.

 

 

From tomorrow night (Tuesday 16 February) Canberra is going to get a chance to try this style of payment at Ben & Jerry’s OpenAir Cinema. If you’re heading along tomorrow night, and are keen to see what the future looks like, download the Hey You App from either the Google or Apple app stores.

 

 

If all of this looks familiar, it might be because you’ve used the former iteration of the app - Beat the Q - over the last couple of years, you’ll know it’s a pretty good system for quickly transferring payments and keeping track of your loyalty points.

 

 

Now, with the new branding and design of Hey You, the experience is even more personalised, and offers benefits for businesses and their customers. All of this will be available for you to try tomorrow night (and for the rest of this week at Ben & Jerry’s OpenAir Cinema). You can even pre-order your drinks and popcorn before settling in for one of the great films from this year’s awards season. No need to wait in queues – it will all be there waiting for you.

 

 

As we become an increasingly cashless society, it will be apps such as this that do battle for our hearts and minds (and wallets). To be the go-to app for electronic payments is a massive prize, and you can bet that tech giants like Apple, Google and Facebook are watching carefully to see who comes out on top.