News in brief from the NFC world and beyond: Twitter and Docomo add ‘touch and follow’ • Doubletwist shares songs with NFC • Airtag offers P2P loyalty • Lifera and Taztag tie up • Lockitron opens doors with NFC • DPT unveils NFC-enabled car park pay machine • SK C&C USA rebrands as CorFire • Bayer puts antennas into decorative films • Mobey Forum expands • and much more… More
Analysis by Comscore for its 2010 Mobile Year in Review has found that just under 10% of Japanese mobile subscribers made a purchase with their mobile wallet during December 2010... More
Mobile network operator NTT Docomo, the driving force behind Japan’s Osaifu-Keitai mobile wallet service, has confirmed that it will make the move to NFC standard technology from “around the end of 2012”, in partnership with Korea’s KT. More
News in brief from the NFC world and beyond: MasterCard wins Oyster deal • PayPal nears 100m accounts • Proxama buys Hypertag • Palm tablets to include NFC? • Contactless grows in the UK • NTT Docomo, KT and China Mobile tie up. More
NTT Docomo has begun the world’s first mass market deployment of mobile phones with NFC tag reading capabilities. Sixteen of the operator’s new range of mobile phones and a number of existing handsets will be able to perform both Osaifu-Keitai mobile contactless payments functions and NFC tag reading from next week. More
NTT Docomo is set to make the switch to NFC standard technology in 2013, according to a report in Japanese business newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun... More
The three mobile network operators are to move away from the non-NFC mobile contactless technologies they currently support in favour of an NFC standard solution. More
The winning entries in this year’s NFC Forum Global Competition include retail payments, healthcare, education and social networking applications. More
NTT Communications has launched a new service that enables businesses to offer a range of mobile marketing services to users of Japan’s Osaifu-Keitai mobile wallet service... More
The NFC Forum has announced the twenty finalists for its 2010 Global Competition... 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 for EMV compliant payment applications and for Mifare ticketing applications... More
Carl Atsushi Hirano, the driving force behind the introduction five years ago of Japan’s Osaïfu Keitai mobile wallet service, has set out his thinking on what was required to make the service a success and what it will take to successfully introduce NFC services in other countries. More
GUEST COMMENT: We’re unlikely to end up with a single TSM per country, or per region, or per operator — which isn’t what many people imagined when the TSM model became current, writes Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion. More
There are now over ten million subscribers to NTT Docomo’s Osaifu-Keitai based mobile credit card payment service DCMX and, overall, a total of 30 million Docomo subscribers are now equipped with Osaifu-Keitai handsets. More
Moversa’s new U-SAM chip enables multiple contactless technologies to be supported on one mobile phone, raising the possibility that consumers could soon be using their NFC handsets for everything from Mifare metro tickets and Japanese Osaifu-Keitai electronic wallet functions to Visa and MasterCard contactless transactions. More
Membership of the NFC Forum is continuing to grow at a rapid pace. Handset manufacturers, mobile service providers, payment services providers, chip makers, solution developers, municipalities and academic institutions have all recently joined up. More
The mobile industry association has finalised its device requirements for NFC handsets and called on manufacturers to put phones incorporating the Single Wire Protocol interface into consumers’ hands by the middle of next year. More
NTT’s new patent pending Key-Shuttle platform enables loyalty points, ID photos and other membership information from over a hundred retailers to all be registered and accessed from a customers’ mobile phone. More