French supermarket chain E Leclerc is set to roll out NFC electronic shelf labels to six hypermarkets this year, following a successful introduction of the technology at a store in the Paris suburbs in late 2012.

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Just over 950m mobile phone users worldwide are forecast to use their handsets for mobile ticketing by 2018, up from 458m this year, according to a new report from Juniper Research, but NFC ticketing will be slower to hit the mainstream than the analysts had previously expected.

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The SD Association has introduced a standard for MicroSD cards containing NFC secure elements. Smart microSD cards will make use of the Single Wire Protocol (SWP), originally introduced as a way to connect SIM cards with NFC controllers, and are designed to work with phones equipped with their own NFC antenna.

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A new variant of the Samsung Galaxy S4 looks more like a point-and-shoot camera than a smartphone and offers enhanced photographic capabilities along with NFC.

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Visa Europe is to launch an NFC mobile payments service in the UK by the end of 2013, the payments network has confirmed to NFC World — although the exact launch date and full details on how the service will work are yet to be revealed.

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A US startup with ambitious plans to build "the world's first smartphone you can wear like a bracelet" is seeking investment on crowdfunding site Indiegogo.

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SoftBank Mobile has selected Gemalto as its trusted service manager for the commercial launch of NFC services in Japan. The carrier's NFC platform will be hosted at Gemalto's data centre in Singapore and run on its Allynis Trusted Service Management solution.

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Weve, the mobile advertising and payments joint venture formed last year by UK mobile network operators Vodafone, EE and O2, aims to launch a mass market NFC payments service "by next year", CEO David Sear has told the Financial Times.

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China Mobile, the world's largest mobile network operator, and Chinese bank card association China UnionPay have announced that their NFC payments service is now live in more than fourteen Chinese cities, including Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou — and eight banks have signed up to make use of the partners' platform.

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Chinese mobile phone maker FAEA has launched the F1 Penguin, a budget Android NFC phone costing 699 Yuan (US$113), and announced the F2 Penguin, an Android 4.2 NFC handset with a 5-inch full HD display and a 13 megapixel camera.

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