Mobile payment start-up Bling Nation has landed a big deal with PayPal, enabling Bling Nation’s customers to make contactless mobile purchases using their PayPal account, according to techcrunch.com.

Bling Nation offers customers contactless stickers that can be attached to any handset to make debit-style mobile purchases. The more purchases a user makes, the more coupons, rewards points, or discounts he or she racks up, determined by the retailer. 
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Seven leading players in the NFC ecosystem: Ericsson, Gemalto, NXP, Oberthur Technologies, STMicroelectronics, Venyon, a company in the Giesecke&Devrient group, and ViVOtech, joined forces to form the MIFARE4Mobile Industry Group.

The aim of the group is to work together to standardize and advance the uniform management of MIFARE applications on NFC-enabled secure elements, such as SIM cards and mobile phones. 
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GlobalPlatform, an international body for smart card infrastructure development, has entered into a Contribution Agreement with Association Française pour le ‘Sans Contact’ Mobile (AFSCM), an organization aimed at promoting the technical development of NFC and contactless mobile services.

As part of the agreement, AFSCM, who contributed the Nice NFC project, will provide its business processes and end-to-end system architecture to GlobalPlatform for integration into its specifications, which will allow greater global access to AFSCM case materials and assist the advancement of the NFC ecosystem worldwide. 
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First Data Corporation and INSIDE Contactless announced the introduction of a new MasterCard PayPass contactless payment tag.

Based on INSIDE’s MicroPass payment platform, the MasterCard PayPass mobile payment tag offers an economical solution for contactless mobile payment. Users simply attach the tag to their mobile phone to give it all the functionality of a traditional credit or debit card. 
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MasterCard’s PayPass has recorded 49% growth in the first quarter of 2010 compared to the same period last year, according to bernama.com.

MasterCard says a major contributing factor to this growth is the high level of consumer satisfaction with the contactless payment service, with 94% of PayPass customers reporting they are “satisfied” to “very satisfied.” 
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NFC may get the breakthrough it needs with upcoming city transit projects and a new line of Nokia phones, according to Network World.

Just last week, Nokia announced that next year’s batch of Symbian mobile phones will contain NFC technology. ABI Research says this move will spark growth in the number of NFC chipset vendors, ultimately resulting in lower costs for phone vendors due to boosted competition. 
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Following on the heels of Nice, the French Riviera is planning to implement its own mobile tour guide system based on NFC technology.

Dubbed the CHEMIN project, the system offers visitors multimedia content, including audio, text, photos and videos, for each town and village visited. The media is accessed by waving an NFC handset over specially marked tags at historical points of interest. 
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