Archive for February 2010

Bloomberg reports that China Mobile may be about to buy a 20% stake in Shanghai Pudong Development Bank at a cost of 40bn yuan (about $5.9bn). The move, if confirmed, would give China Mobile's new... More

OPINION: A host of new NFC products and initiatives were announced at this year's Mobile World Congress but, it seems, we will have to wait until the end of this year before the first NFC handsets become widely available in the West. More

Visa Inc has appointed Bill Gajda as its new head of mobile. Gajda will join Visa from the GSMA, where he is currently the mobile association's chief commercial officer, responsible for strategic initiatives including mobile... More

Hana Card, the Korean credit card issuer in which SK Telekom took a 49% stake in December, has announced it is to launch its new mobile proximity service in mid-March. "Our goal is securing 400,000-500,000... More

Vivotech has selected Zapa Technology as its preferred partner for managed Trusted Service Manager (TSM) services in Europe. "Zapa Technology has focused on executing commercial NFC programs," says John Nagle, the company's CEO. "Having Vivotech... More

The mobile operator has signed up five Chinese banks and five transport operators for the commercial launch of its NFC service, scheduled to take place during the second quarter of 2010. More

"We felt the quality of the consumer experience was not what it needed to be," Nokia's VP of Industry Collaborations has told NFC World, but "our commitment to NFC remains as strong as ever." More

EnStream, the joint venture between Canada's three leading mobile operators which operates the Zoompass mobile wallet service, aims to offer NFC or contactless enabled handsets to customers within the year, the company has told NFC... More

Italian start-up FreeAccess has developed a new service that enables users to send each other Twitter-like NFC-based short messages by simply tapping their NFC handset over a friend's phone. TouchTwits are part of a new... More

Cash payments accounted for 78% of Europe's 388 billion retail payment transactions in 2008, according to a new study by Retail Banking Research (RBR), and the cost of distributing, managing, handling, processing and recycling cash... More

MoLo Rewards has launched its mobile rewards programme in the cities of San Diego and Toronto. First announced at DemoFall in September 2009, the service uses contactless stickers attached to users' mobile phones to identify... More

The bestselling touchscreen phone, known by a number of brand names in different regions, is to be used in trials in Spain, France and Dubai — but there are no plans yet to make the NFC version of the handset available at retail. More

A team from French science engineering graduate school Polytech'Marseille has been shortlisted in the 2010 Simagine awards for an NFC application designed to ease the pain of parking in busy urban areas. The Parkeur application... More

Gemalto has announced a partnership with leading coupon specialist HighCo that will see the company adding mobile coupons to its NFC Trusted Service Manager (TSM) offering. Using an application in the mobile phone, users will... More

Trusted Logic has announced a new initiative to provide an open, standardized API for building NFC functionality into Android devices. "Trusted Logic and its partners have initiated a standardization effort for the NFC Android API... More

The global customer base for mobile banking will reach 1.1bn by the year 2015, according to a new report from Global Industry Analysts. Convenience of mobile banking operations and the need to lower transactional costs... More

Zapa Technology has partnered with Mobiun to enable users of its mobile loyalty system to check and manage loyalty points they have collected via their mobile handsets. Zapa, which raised €2.5m in funding in July... More

Veolia Transport has appointed Trusted Labs to validate the company's NFC transport application, which will be deployed as part of the Nice NFC City pre-commercial pilot due to take place from the second quarter of... More

The new funding brings the government's investment in kick-starting mobile contactless innovation to a total of €10 million. More

The Norwegian telecoms firm and the SIM and smart card specialist are using an NFC-enabled key fob in combination with a new wireless-enabled SIM to deliver NFC functionality to 100% of today's mobile phones. More