Archive for March 2010

OPINION: Korean mobile network operator SK Telecom's new T Smart Pay service comes with more than one twist to the 'standard' NFC business model. Not only has SKT bought its way into a card issuer for the launch, but it is also signing distribution deals with leading retailers. More

Korean consumers who sign up for a Hana SK Card credit account and pick up a new '13.56MHz RF SIM' via a retail partner will then be able to store multiple credit, loyalty and membership cards and discount coupons on their mobile phone. More

Adirondack Trust, a local bank in New York State, has introduced a mobile contactless payments service to its personal and business customers. The bank is using Bling Nation's mobile sticker-based Community Payments Service, a closed-loop... More

The ZigBee Alliance has announced it has now completed development of ZigBee Telecom Services, a new standard enabling operators to offer a range of mobile proximity services to consumers using standard handsets and SIMs containing... More

The NFC Forum has announced the twenty finalists for its 2010 Global Competition. This year's entries covered a broad span of consumer and business application areas, says the NFC Forum, and came from Asia, Europe... More

SIM and smart card standards body GlobalPlatform has launched a Trusted Service Manager (TSM) Working Group. The working group was created in response to market demand, says GlobalPlatform, and will focus on analysing the interfaces... More

Finnish technical research institute VTT has produced a video showing its NFC-based social networking concept in action: Hot in the City won first place in the NFC Forum Global Competition's Research Track last year. The... More

ADMR, the French national association for providers of home care services, is to begin equipping staff with NFC phones from next month. The association's 3,350 local members have a total of 90,000 employees, providing services... More

The new Mobile Wallet Service is a software-as-a-service platform for mobile network operators that combines proximity payments, mobile marketing, ticketing, international remittances, P2P funds transfer and mcommerce services.  More

Card personalization and secure ID specialist NBS Technologies has added NFC capability to its UbiQPersoMaster personalisation software suite. The new NFC application enables financial institutions to automate the process of uploading their customers' card details... More

Chinese SIM and smart card supplier Eastcompeace has announced that its RF SIM card has now been certified by the Ministry of Information Industry's IC Card Quality Supervision Center. "The success enables Eastcompeace to provide... More

A new patent application sees Apple using the term 'trusted service', hinting at the company's potential to play a major role as a Trusted Service Manager for mainstream mobile applications and, perhaps, for mobile payments and NFC. More

A new technology from US start-up Bump, which lets consumers use phones equipped with accelerometers to make peer-to-peer payments and share images or contact details, has been adopted by PayPal for its new Send Money service. More

The bank card association is conducting NFC pilots in Shanghai, Ningbo and Changsha and has extended its mobile payments services to a total of six provinces and regions. More

The cards "will be sold where consumers buy memory cards today, including retail merchants and major network operators as well as new locations such as mass transit kiosks and financial institution branch locations," says First Data, and "SideTap MicroSD cards may also come pre-bundled in handsets." More

OPINION: Interest in near field communication is gathering pace in the financial services sector, fuelled by the arrival of NFC-enabled microSD cards and a recognition that there is a business model to be found — so long as you look for it hard enough. More

Ericsson Labs has upgraded Tag Tool, the set of developer tools for working with NFC and RFID tags first launched in November 2009. "The idea behind Tag Tool is very simple," Ericsson Labs explains. "You... More

Card issuer Barclaycard and mobile network operator Orange are to launch a commercial NFC service in the UK before the end of 2010, a senior Barclaycard executive has revealed. Sarah Mansfield, Barclaycard's head of innovation... More

'This pilot provides insights which will prove crucial to getting the customer experience right as we, together with the industry, bring next-generation mobile financial services to market,' says Citi. More

DeviceFidelity has signed up the first licensees for its microSD format NFC solution, UK mobile payments provider Monitise and US mobile solutions provider Ecrio, and has announced version 2 of its In2Pay product, adding support... More