News in brief from the NFC world and beyond: Czech mobile payments • Akbank pushes contactless • Visa opens up • The rich love a bargain • Germany moves to contactless ID • mFoundy’s mobile banking guarantee • Amsterdam shops to refuse cash • Starbucks expands 2D payments • M-Pesa adds supermarkets • WiFi goes P2P • and more… More
KT, Korea’s second largest mobile network operator, is to launch a commercial NFC service at the end of October using a new NFC phone made by Samsung. The SHW-A170K feature phone is to be followed with a range of Android NFC phones and KT predicts that, by 2015, NFC phones will account for 47% of sales. More
Three months after it announced plans to buy NFC specialist Innovision for US$47.5m, the deal has completed and Broadcom VP Craig Ochikubo has spoken to NFC World about the company’s ambitions for Innovision and for the NFC market as a whole. More
Semiconductor giant Broadcom Corporation has announced it has agreed to acquire UK-based NFC specialist Innovision Research & Technology in a deal valued at US$47.5m... More
Adding NFC functionality to a mobile phone will soon cost less than a dollar, says Innovision’s Stephen Graham, with 15% to 20% of all the handsets shipped in 2012 set to include the company’s low-cost NFC technology. More
TazCard, a stand-alone NFC device which communicates via USB and Zigbee instead of a mobile network connection, is set to launch by the end of 2010 with a target price of €150 — and a very different approach to building NFC ecosystems. More
Developers looking to create NFC solutions and devices will now be able to download the company’s NFC protocol stack for Android, MeeGo, Linux and Windows Mobile phones from the Sourceforge free open source software website. More
The Japanese electronics manufacturer’s new rugged PDA is equipped with both 3G mobile data and a range of functions for retrieving and gathering data in the field — including NFC. More
There wasn’t much to see in the way of mainstream NFC developments at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show — but some interesting potentially competitive technologies and enabling solutions made the massive Las Vegas event worth casting an eye over. More