While a Frost & Sullivan study warns of uneven market conditions in the Asia Pacific smart card market, countries with a strong contactless infrastructure already in place shouldn’t see a significant decline in smart card production. In fact, according to the report, some countries in the region, such as Japan and South Korea, have continued to expand and add new projects, particularly in the mobile payments area. ▸

Visa has put together a Malaysian partnership that includes a bank, a cell phone manufacturer and a mobile phone carrier to launch its first commercial mobile payments service using NFC technology. Consumers are now able to purchase an NFC-enabled mobile phone off the shelf and use it to make Visa payWave-enabled transactions at the point-of-sale in place of their credit card.

Maxis, Malaysia’s largest wireless carrier with more than 11 million subscribers, handset manufacturer Nokia and Maybank, are the other partners. ▸

Scotland-based i4 Product Design has developed for another Scottish company, Tailwind Solutions, a contactless card payment solution for retailers that works in an EMV environment, allowing consumers to pay with their NFC-compliant phones or contactless EMV cards.

The PoS Paddle Tap-It, which launched at the Contactless Intelligence Conference and Exhibition in London last week, is designed to work with all retailers’ existing EMV configurations. ▸

AuthenTec, a developer of biometric technology, has announced that ASUS will be including AuthenTec’s fingerprint sensors in its netbooks for increased security. The netbook, a small simplified laptop, is the first of its kind to come standard with fingerprint sensors.  

Citibank Singapore partnered with Visa and M1, a mobile operator, to deploy a three-month near field communication pilot in Singapore, according tot he E-Commerce Journal.

The trial will started in May and will include 300 Citi M1 Platinum Visa cardholders. Participants will be given a Nokia 6212 classic handset. Participants of the experiment will be enabled to make purchases of up to $66 at more than 750 merchants by waving the NFC-enabled mobile phones over a contactless reader at the point of sale.

Read more here.  

KORE Telematics, a Reston, Va. digital wireless services provider specializing in machine-to-machine communications, and ITN International, a Bethesda, Md. provider of information exchange tools for trade shows, are providing a full service wireless lead generation solution for CTIA Wireless 2009 April 1-3 in Las Vegas. ▸

Contactless chip provider INSIDE Contactless and First Data, a Denver-based electronic commerce and payment processing service, have signed a three-year agreement to develop contactless payment stickers which can be affixed to mobile phones or other devices. First Data will market the sticker as the GO-Tag, while INSIDE will supply its MicroPass payment sticker prelaminates exclusively to First Data-qualified card manufacturers for production. ▸