According to a report on nearfieldcommunicationsworld.com, Christian Estrosi, the French minister for industry, has announced that the French government will award 13 grants to companies working on RFID and Near Field Communication (NFC) projects. The cumulative cost of these grants is expected to reach several million euros.

Most of the RFID projects involve IT and asset tracking, such as Lamap’s medical record-tracking STAM-RFID solution and MPE Technology’s Digiprice, a solution for handling real time inventory checking, dynamic labeling, anti-theft processes and customer loyalty all on the same platform. 

Chinese RFID manufacturer HANYUAN has announced the release of their new leather key-fob.

According to HANYUAN, the portable, waterproof key-ring tag is suitable for use in employee access control, time attendance, membership management and NFC payment systems.

The leather key-fob is HANYUAN’s latest addition to its line of key-ring RFID tags, providing an upscale alternative to the colorful plastic-encased AB Series key-fob tags released earlier this year.  

The Smart Card Alliance scheduled a webinar focusing on identity management in health care. The session is scheduled for Sept. 22 at 1 pm ET.

Presenters will discuss the challenges with identity management in health care and why it’s important to establish a secure health care information management infrastructure both within health care organizations and with health care data exchanges. 

Payment data breaches in the U.S. have caused individuals to go to two camps, either implement EMV or deploy end-to-end encryption of payment data. The Smart Card Alliance, however, is suggesting another option: contactless chip card technology and online dynamic cryptograms.

The Smart Card Alliance publication states that there is a lot of confusion when it comes to encryption. “End-to-end encryption does not necessarily mean the same thing to all people, and the payments industry has not yet defined standards,” the paper states. 

Alcatel-Lucent announced a competition led by its Touchatag venture where software developers compete to create an innovative NFC urban game for mobile phones. Competition winners will receive a total of more than $7,200 in cash prizes.

Called the “Vienna Jungle Scrum,” the competition is one component of mobilkom austria’s A1 InnovationDays 2009, taking place on September 26 and 27, and is intended to motivate developers around the world to create new mobile applications using NFC technology. The competition challenges designers and software developers to use the city of Vienna as a backdrop to create an urban game. 

Non‐cash payment volumes continued to grow in 2008 after an increase of 8.6% globally in 2007 to 250 billion transactions, according to the World Payments Report 2009, released today from Capgemini, RBS and Efma. The use of cards continues to be the single strongest driver for this growth with Global credit and debit card transactions growing 14.5% in 2007 and 11.2% in 2008.

Asia is a region that’s using new payment technology to increase revenue. Best practices and a range of initiatives out of Asia have demonstrated that payments innovation is a potential source of revenue, particularly with non banks. The Asian market offers insights on the success factors for developing different payment tools, and the opportunities for banks to generate new revenues from emerging payment instruments. 

RFinity, an Idaho Falls technology company specializing in secure NFC identification and transactions, has launched a pilot at the Idaho campus of Brigham Young University of an open encryption platform using a secure microSD card with a contactless interface developed by Giesecke & Devrient, a German security technology company.

With RFinity’s patented integration platform and G&D’s hardware, BYU-I students will test a secure, contactless identification and transaction system that will allow them to make purchases using only their mobile phones. Initially, the pilot will only cover the university’s bookstore.