So, this is cool, but... Why do you have to have a smartphone to do this? If you're going to get businesses on board and use photo IDs to verify every transact

So, this is cool, but... Why do you have to have a smartphone to do this? If you're going to get businesses on board and use photo IDs to verify every transaction, why not just have the signup process be a webcam and a form? There's a couple of cool usability things you can do with a smartphone (proximity pushes users that are there to the top of the list in case of name conflicts, whether it's from geofencing, manual inputs, or side-channel geo info), but the basic idea of registering for a store doesn't seem that novel. Why not slap a decent search UI on it and give all the cashiers iPads? Is this idea so novel that nobody thought you could look up a name and photo via the web at point of sale before today? And if the idea isn't novel, why hasn't anybody successfully executed it?