Near Field Communications Handsets and Tags, NFC Pilots and Projects

O2 ready to launch NFC but needs more phones

Thursday, July 16, 2009

O2, a UK provider of mobile and broadband services, says it is ready to go with NFC but is waiting on support from retailers and handset manufacturers. O2 began piloting NFC in 2007 with customers using a Nokia phone and backing from Barclays bank. According to Mobile News, O2 is now in discussions with large retailers for the deployment of the necessary electronic point of sale units and with handset manufacturers to enable NFC on all future devices.

“From our trials we gathered that customers love NFC. The challenges are the deployment of electronic point of sale systems across mass retail, so we are talking to large retailers and the transport industry about this,” O2 chief executive Ronan Dunne said.

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HID Global has announced the successful completion of the world’s first university pilot of NFC smart phones carrying digital keys.

First announced in September, the pilot involved a select group of students and staff at Arizona State University using NFC-enabled smart phones equipped with HID’s Secure Identity Object (SIO) Technology. Participants could gain access to their residence halls and other secure access areas by tapping their handset against a reader embedded in the door and entering a PIN, rather than use their plastic campus card.

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KT Corporation, Korea’s largest teleco, is predicting that 20 million NFC-enabled phones will be in the hands of South Koreans by the end of 2012 – accounting for nearly 40% of the country’s total population, according to NFC World.

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UK mobile operator O2 is delaying the launch of its “O2 Wallet” mobile contactless payments, loyalty and transit app due to concerns that it is “not yet offering an adequate customer experience,” reports MarketingWeek.

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McDonald’s and Barclaycard are gearing up to launch NFC awareness campaigns aimed at spurring the adoption of contactless payment technology, according to MarketingWeek.

Barclaycard, which holds the highest share (71%) of the UK contactless market, reports that contactless transactions have doubled in the last year, but are still “nowhere near” where they want to be, according to Tom Gregory, Barclaycard’s head of digital payments.

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Sprint Nextel has announced that it will make NFC a standard feature on Long Term Evolution (LTE) smart phones, reports Light Reading Mobile.

Sprint, a launch partner of Google Wallet, told LR Mobile that they will include NFC chips in all LTE smart phones, excluding free phones and low end models, in order to “aggressively promote contactless technology.”

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CARTES in North America, a new annual card manufacturing, payment, identification and digital security expo and conference, has placed mobile payments at the center of its agenda of this year’s inaugural event.

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