I’ll admit it - I love reading Valleywag. It’s a great cynical counter to TechCrunch, as well as to countless tech beat writers who parrot press releases and are baffled when high-flying and well-funded companies fail. This is also the domain of Uncov, which is pretty funny as well but doesn’t post nearly as often.

One of my favorite threads on Valleywag recently has been about the behind the scenes scandal at Pay By Touch, and I don’t know how much of it is accurate but damn is it exciting.

The gist of it? Their CEO is a crazy, egomaniac con-man who somehow raised three hundred million dollars for a company with no strategy which he was not at all qualified to run.This story sums it up pretty well.

Don’t believe that it’s doomed to fail? Try searching for businesses using Pay By Touch in the Bay Area.

A Biometrics company that stores my fingerprints, driver license number, and bank information…. and doesn’t work in one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the world? Sign me up!

So Pay By Touch attempted to basically replace credit cards, all at once. That’s a pretty unrealistic goal.

I started thinking about this in the shower today (this is where most of my good ideas come from) and thought, hey, what if I could run such a huge company? Access to multiple biometrics companies’ technology and minds and a crapload of funding? Sounds like a good time to me.

What’s the market opportunity though? Who could benefit most from biometrics? It’s far more useful and sensible a technology to verify identity, rather than to make financial transactions. With enough resources and some mass production, there are two obvious areas to get into: Corporate clients with major security concerns, and airports.

Now remember, this is fantasy world, so bare with me.

First, Pay By Touch could go after DHS contracts to outfit airports with biometrics hardware which customers could use for check-in. Of course, there would be major privacy concerns, but DHS would probably love to be able to cross-check the fingerprints of everyone on every airplane flying in the U.S., and the current administration seems to love having Big Brother-style surveillance at its disposal anyway. In fact, right there, Pay By Touch could be profitable.

Then they’d actually have to get to work, getting airlines on board and convincing people to register. Getting people used to this idea would probably take ten years or so, but the first people to use it would be frequent flyers - who could be given priority at check-in and allowed to show up later than everyone else in exchange for being a part of the program. Users could also maintain a profile via Pay By Touch, which would work across multiple airlines and store whatever preferences the airlines are interested in hearing about. For airlines with built-in computers (hint hint, Virgin America), the profile could even be used for ad targeting when the computers aren’t in use, or to recommend premium content.

Convincing people to adopt all of this without feeling like criminals is always going to be incredibly difficult, which is why I mentioned a ten year horizon for getting average consumers used to it.

However, major corporations dealing with sensitive information - most of them - would love to be able to use biometrics as opposed to those stupid magnetic/RFID cards which can be easily lost, broken, or stolen… unlike fingers. I am aware that some corporations use biometrics already, but a huge company like Pay By Touch could have used scale to appeal as a cheaper and/or standardized option… as well as using any government contracts to offset that cost.

After all of this, of course, they’ll have to change their name to something a little less molest-y.

But instead, they tried to take on the credit card industry and implement a strategy that only works if it is ubiquitous, which is nearly impossible to achieve.

That was a fun little exercise. If you could run a huge company, what would you do?