Executive Editor Chris Corum discusses a number of easy do-it-yourself NFC applications, the current state of handsets and tags, and the NFC Innovation Award winners with Innovision’s Julia Charnock.

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NFC has arrived at Gonzaga University, Spokane, Wash., where vending machines with USA Technologies’ ePort are capable of reading an NFC-enabled cell phone. It coincides with an NFC pilot program currently underway in Spokane involving Nokia phones equipped with MasterCard PayPass.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in San Francisco starts a four-month trial today in which 230 hand-picked volunteers will be able to use mobile phones to purchase tickets, pass through the fare gates and download information.

The participants, all regular BART riders who have Sprint or Boost mobile service plans, will test Near Field Communication, allowing their phones to interact with everything from ticket machines to smart advertisements in the stations. They also will be able to pay for food and drinks at Jack in the Box restaurants during the trial period.

BART is having a press conference unveiling the cell phone trial at its Powell Street station in San Francisco at 10:30 a.m. Jan. 29. Check back for more information later.  

U.S. Bank, MasterCard Worldwide and Nokia have introduced a mobile payments pilot program in Spokane, Washington. Program participants received a new Nokia mobile phone equipped with MasterCard PayPass payment functionality, which allows them to pay for purchases with a tap of their mobile phone, instead of sliding a card through a magnetic stripe reader, handing it over to the cashier, or fumbling for cash and coins. Program participants received Nokia 6131 NFC phones, which are equipped with the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology needed to communicate with MasterCard PayPass readers.

Over the next few months, 12 mobile operators will run trials of contactless mobile payment services in Australia, France, Ireland, Korea, Malaysia, Norway, The Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Turkey and the U.S. as a precursor to commercial launches. The MicroRead® NFC chip from INSIDE Contactless will power the critical contactless payment transactions in most of the handsets being used in the trials. The technology implemented by INSIDE will allow the mobile operators to quickly deploy SIM-based applications, thanks to a direct link between the NFC chip and the SIM card via the standard SWP (single wire protocol). The trials are part of the GSM Association’s Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative, which is designed to provide a single global approach to enabling contactless payments using a mobile phone. 35 mobile operators representing 1.3 billion customers are participating in the initiative.

Innovision Research & Technology has announced the winners of its NFC Innovation Awards, the first UK-based competition to find the most innovative applications of NFC tags for the everyday mobile handset user. The competition required UK-based academic teams of up to four participants to produce an abstract proposing a novel NFC application using the firm’s Topaz tag and an NFC-enabled mobile handset. The three finalists, all from UK universities, explored the use of tags for a range of innovative and pragmatic purposes. There were two joint winners. One was ‘Health Buddy’ from a Lancaster University team and the other was a vehicle identification application from a North East Wales Institute of Higher Education team. In third place was a mobile NFC and healthcare application from a team at the University of Dundee. The full story includes descriptions of each.

INSIDE Contactless was chosen as a finalist for the GSMA Mobile Innovation Global Awards 2008 in the category for Most Innovative Device-Centric Technology. INSIDE’s MicroRead™ product implements Near Field Communications (NFC) with several unique technical features, which has resulted in its selection by most of the 12 GSMA-sponsored “Pay-Buy-Mobile” trials around the world. The Mobile Innovation Global Awards are designed to help thousands of small and medium-sized companies who are developing innovative mobile products and services reach mobile operators globally. Hundreds of companies compete each year, and only 10 finalists are selected.

ZDNet explores the current uses of NFC through out the world in their recent article Around the world in … Near Field Communications (NFC). The article has the details from Australia, where the article was written and where a new NFC trial is expected to start soon as well as the happenings of NFC in Asia and Europe.  

Mobile provider Turkcell and Garanti Bank in Turkey this month launched a Near Field Communication trial for mobile payments involving a contactless MasterCard PayPass credit card application stored on the SIM card of a mobile phone. E-Kart, collaborating with Giesecke & Devrient is supplying the NFC-enabled SIM cards. In addition, Venyon, a joint venture between G&D and Nokia, will handle the secure uploading and administration of the payment function over the air.

“Click,” the BBC’s flagship technology program, has chosen NFC as one of its five top technologies for 2008. BBC News selected the five technologies from the hundreds of consumer products and technologies on display at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) International in Las Vegas last week. The television news story ran numerous times on BBC News 24, BBC One, and BBC Breakfast, and is also available online at BBC News.