NFC World

The two companies are combining their mobile couponing solutions to enable retailers to offer promotional, gift or loyalty vouchers to customers via either standard SMS text messages or directly to their NFC-enabled mobile phones. More

The twenty companies on the shortlist for the titles of "The Best NFC Service of the Year" and "The Most Innovative NFC Research Project of the Year" have been revealed... More

The new Blaze Mobile Mastercard PayPass sticker can be attached to any phone and is seen as a bridge to offering full NFC capabilities. More

The company says it is the first to offer a single solution for provisioning NFC applications over-the-air, regardless of how the customer's NFC functionality has been implemented.  More

OPINION: Yet another way to get around the absence of NFC handsets has been announced this week and, this time, it's a really strong contender. More

There are fourteen new opportunities on the NFCW Jobs Board this week in the US, Canada, France, the UK and India. Recruiters include Microsoft and Inside Contactless and the offers range from Director-level openings to software development vacancies. More

The smart card chip manufacturer and the French start-up are working together to bring to market the TazCard, a 6mm thick card-sized smart object with a touch screen, fingerprint sensor and NFC, USB and ZigBee interfaces that could be used for access control, ticketing, couponing and payment applications.  More

The mobile operator has put together a combined NFC handset/NFC tag package for customers that uses the tags to access WAP pages, including an option to buy ÖBB rail tickets. More

Transit ticketing supplier Cubic has partnered with Vivotech to offer its customers, who include the transit operators for London, Washington and New York/New Jersey, the ability to upgrade their ticketing systems to accept payment via contactless cards and NFC phones. More

UPDATED Consumers can simply pair the company's new 'With Me' device, expected to retail at US$25, with their existing Bluetooth phone in order to NFC-enable their handset. More

The firm's X-Series handsets incorporate an NFC chip and internal antenna plus an optional MicroSD-based secure element from Cell Idea. They are fully Mifare compatible and are expected to start at under US$100 in volume. More

The mobile operator and the bank-owned transaction processing supplier are testing a Mobile Virtual Wallet with potential applications in payments, transport, healthcare and personal identification. More

The contactless and NFC infrastructure specialist has been granted a broad patent covering the over-the-air provisioning of payments cards, loyalty cards and other non-payments cards to NFC phones — and has also secured an extra US$8.6m in funding. More

NXP and Gemalto have signed a deal that will see Gemalto taking over NXP's mobile services business unit in Sophia Antipolis. More

All customers are expected to be able to use their phones to pay for everyday items within three years in "the biggest revolution in payments since plastic cards were introduced over 40 years ago." More

The new product offering uses the Single Wire Protocol to securely link a Gemalto SIM card with an embedded secure element from Inside Contactless. More

Both suppliers have announced they are close to adding Mifare functionality to their SIM cards. More

OPINION: The last two weeks have seen two major breakthroughs for NFC. First, Singapore has become the first country to get all the key players to sign up for the creation of a fully inter-operable, multi-application national NFC ecosystem. More

Singapore's banks, telecoms networks and transit operators have given the go ahead for the creation of a national trusted third party designed to ensure full interoperability between the NFC services of all mobile operators and all service providers. More

More than 40% of British consumers say they would use their phone to make payments — and ease of use would be their main reason for doing so. More