what-is-chromecastGoogle’s Chromecast is a pretty handy little gizmo for broadcasting from your tablet or smartphone to your TV set—not just by transmitting movies or music, but also by using screen mirroring to duplicate your mobile’s screen on your TV’s. As we’ve mentioned before, you could use it to read e-books on the big screen of a television, using your standard mobile e-reader app (or one that’s customized to work with the Chromecast, such as the Hoopla library digital media app). And Google is giving folks a chance to earn a Chromecast free, if they’re willing to trust its Android Pay NFC payment app.

Google is running a promotion called Tap10, which will give people a code they can redeem for a free Chromecast dongle if they make ten purchases using Android Pay by the end of February. The purchases must be at least five minutes apart. Along the way, they’ll also earn download codes for three free songs from Google Play.

The way Android Pay works is that you can add one or more credit or debit cards to it, and then instead of swiping a credit card, you simply unlock your phone and tap it against the NFC payment pad at participating merchants. The Android Pay web site has a list of them, which includes a number of recognizable names such as GameStop, McDonald’s, Office Depot, Panera Bread, Staples, and so on, or it should also work with stores that use generic NFC payment pads.

The promotion is supposed to work by popping up an offer screen as soon as you install and set up the Android Pay app. However, I haven’t seen such a promotion screen myself. I put in a support request to Google to find out why, and they told me that if I haven’t seen the notification screen, I’m not enrolled in the promotion, but that it’s possible I might be randomly selected until I do receive the notification.

The Chromecast is quite a handy little gizmo for e-reading and other media consumption. If you’d be inclined to use an NFC payment app anyway, it might be worth a shot.

(Found via The Verge.)

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