Touch screen digitizing can be done resistively with overlaid wires over the screen. Their touch interface doesn't have to be super accurate, you only seem to touch in a few distinct locations.
A microcontroller is already inside every chip and pin card on the planet. They usually run Java. Yes, Java :)
Bluetooth is just more silicon to do the radio, not hard to stick it on the side of the microcontroller silicon or even have a two-die configuration with wire bonding between the dies. Go look at TI or Freescale 2.4 GHz radio+micro parts, same thing just there it's in a QFN or other solder-down package, but the dies themselves are quite small. A 2.4 GHz antenna is easy to fab out of printed silver or other printable conductive material onto plastic.
NFC is already in many credit cards for the whole "tap to pay" thing. It's just some extra silicon on the side of the microcontroller in existing solutions. Harvesting power from NFC is just some diodes and a resonant circuit along with loop antenna.
Realistically, such a piece of silicon plus the antennas plus the plastic card should only cost you single digit dollars in volume to manufacture. Adding an eInk screen like that is another couple bucks, at most. The $155 price point is probably so they can make back their up-front costs as getting customized silicon isn't cheap, nor is some of the development work they did to get all the features integrated.
If this concept takes off, I'd expect in 2-3 years that cards like this are issued by banks for free to customers. The cost of manufacturing really isn't that high.
EDIT: But getting enough battery packed in to avoid charging every day or two, that's really the novel part if they have real bluetooth operation.
Then - an antenna for bluetooth, NFC and for wireless charging? Combine those and you'll have issues. NFC requires a very small amount of 'wireless power'. Charging a battery requires a more serious amount. Having fried more than one NFC card here at work, I know how tricky it is to work with wireless tech. Good luck managing that.
There is no way this technology exists in the form-factor they're presenting or require. The dynamic magnetic stripe sure is possible, but not that small. You also seriously underestimate the cost of all this. For this to work, they need their own silicon - no way around that fact - which is very expensive, certainly because this is clearly not a product that many people will actually order. But from your pov, "just some more silicon" seems to be a walk in the park. I'm not aware of any e-ink displays avaiable with touch like they presented there. That would by the way need another separate controller. Oh look - more silicon!
This entire picture is not just a "couple bucks". It contains technology you find in current phones at an even smaller scale, with a much smaller target audience. Really - who is going to pay 155 bucks simply to have a plastic card?
To me it all looks like someone dreamed up an utopian payment solution for the US market and built a scam from it. It uses seriously outdated magnetic stripes which is irrelevant to most part of the world, and by the time it would actually be possible to make a stripped down version of this, hopefully NFC/EMV will have replaced this insecure mess and everybody will be paying with their phone.
Anyway - keep an eye on Cartes on 4-6 November - which is THE fair for payment related technologies. If it's not there, it doesn't exist.
Even if it did somehow exist today, isn't it overkill to load this much tech onto a single card, when you can just generate one-time card numbers on the fly?
And the other poster pointed out correctly that for chip reading effectively 50% of the card needs to be that thin. You'd end up with a huge lump in the lower right of the card if you were going to play that game...
Also, you could make the card thicker in areas where it doesn't matter (away from the stripe and the PIN
But if they can do that, I want one, not to pay with, but for the programmable eInk screen with bluetooth connectivity (and touch? get real).
Then I'd hook it into my phone, that would somehow detect who is nearby/looking at it, reverse/stalk their social networks, local graph, location/environment context, little bit of magic, cold reading and random guesswork.
It would show exactly whatever they wanted/expected to see.
I'd have hacked myself a piece of Doctor Who's psychic paper.
[0] or at least for a few years :)
(imagine this card getting stuck in an ATM, suddenly all your cards are lost)
