Near Field Communications Handsets and Tags, NFC Pilots and Projects

KT: 20 million Koreans will have NFC phones this year

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

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.

Some 5 million South Koreans own NFC-enabled phones, which have become a popular form of payment for subway, bus and taxi fares, reports KT. The teleco says the expansion of NFC transit payments will continue to spur NFC handset growth, as will the advent of mobile advertising and the addition of credit card payments to KT’s NFC mobile platform.


This expansion is already well underway, according to KT. So far 12,000 bus shelters in the Gyeonggi Province have been equipped with NFC tags providing transit information. Additionally, NFC-enabled advertisements and information services are beginning to appear in subway cars nationwide.

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RIM has revealed a new NFC sharing app for BlackBerry handsets at BlackBerry World in Orlando, Fla.

According to Pocket-lint, BlackBerry Share enables users with NFC-enabled handsets to share apps with each other by simply tapping the two phones together. Once a connection has been made, each user will be presented with a list of apps the other user has downloaded from BlackBerry App World.

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SK Telecom, headquartered in South Korea, has designed an RFID disposal management system that will encourage citizens to recycle and reduce the amount of daily food waste, according to Earth911.com.

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Mobile operator 2degrees has partnered with contactless transit card provider Snapper to bring NFC payments to the city of Wellington, New Zealand.

The new “Touch2Pay” service is now available on 2degrees’ LG Optimus Net phones, which can be used to make tap and go payments wherever Snapper cards are accepted, including buses, taxis, shops and cafes.

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Global sales of NFC-enabled handsets increased ten-fold in 2011 to 30 million units, according to a new research report by Berg Insight.

Berg’s report predicts that the NFC handset market will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 87.8%, boosting annual shipments to 700 million units in 2016.

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