The Telekom Austria Group announced that its mobile subsidiary mobilkom austria has launched along with Visa Europe and its wholly-owned A1 Bank a credit card for the Austrian market that includes mobile services.

The A1 Visa Card combines the features of a conventional Visa Classic Card with special mobile services such as A1 loyalty points, transaction confirmation by text message for more security, paybox (the Austrian mobile cashless payment system) and a mobile insurance package. Based on the new generation of NFC-capable handsets, the A1 Visa Card is also intended to eventually function as a contactless payment tool via the mobile phone.  

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute and GlobalPlatform have agreed to share industry and technical knowledge and synchronize specification development that will advance mobile services across a range of industries.

GlobalPlatform, the international specification body for the smart card infrastructure, and ETSI’s Smart Card Platform committee, the standardization body which provided the core specifications for more than three billion smart cards in the past year alone, have maintained a general liaison relationship for a number of years. As a result of this previous collaboration, more than two billion SIM cards worldwide are estimated to use the technology defined by the organizations to enable OTA application downloads for 3G and GSM mobile networks.

Read more here.  

Chip maker INSIDE Contactless and Connecthings, a provider of tags and location and time-based content management systems, have announced a partnership to drive NFC deployments beyond payment and transit applications. The two companies intend to develop, promote and commercialize the Wave-Me NFC services platform, a solution carriers and third-party service providers can use to give subscribers access to a broad range of consumer services and applications through their mobile phones.

With this partnership the two companies hope to define the intelligent interfaces and protocols necessary for communication between NFC handsets, NFC tags and the platform. INSIDE will provide its NFC technology know-how, NFC hardware, loadable application-level software for the handset, Wave-Me products, NFC tags and other patented technology. Connecthings brings knowledge from its AdTag server-side contextualized content management, as well as its experience with NFC tag and mobile application life cycle management and other technologies. 

The latest research from the Smart Card Alliance’s Contactless and Mobile Payments Council has identified issuer and merchant best practices for driving consumer use of contactless payments.

The council studied the effectiveness of certain issuer and merchant activities in marketing, promotion and consumer and employee awareness to determine the best way to make consumers more knowledgeable about contactless payments and how to use the technology. 

UPM Raflatac, a manufacturer of RFID tags and inlays and Hansaprint, a Finnish printing house specializing in marketing solutions, are launching an NFC tag portal that will enable customers to create and buy NFC-integrated print products online.

The products that can be ordered from TagAge include labels, patches, stickers and posters. All products can be customized and personalized, with order volumes ranging from dozens to tens of thousands. The TagAge production supports variable data printing to include elements such as consecutive numbers, changing 1D/2D bar codes, text and images. 

Consult Hyperion, a UK-based consultancy that specializes in the fields of secure transactions, contact and contactless multi-application smart card and mobile technology, is the latest company to become a GlobalPlatform member. Consult Hyperion joins the international specification body for smart card infrastructure at the observer level. 

Revenues from smart posters and mobile coupons are likely to drive NFC growth over the next few years, according to a new report from UK-based Juniper Research. The study, “NFC Mobile Payments & Marketing Opportunities: Forecasts & Analysis 2009 - 2014,” predicts NFC mobile payments will exceed $30 billion within three years.

Vendors are developing and launching a variety of interim solutions such as stickers and SD cards to get NFC to market faster on existing phones rather than new NFC enabled phones, the white paper notes.