I have to admit, if you would have asked me about Twitter a couple of months ago I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it was. But then I started reading more about the micro-blogging site and decided to investigate.

I started twittering on March 26 (First tweet: Writing the summer cover story on hacking smart cards). You’ll find a link to our twitter feed on the left hand side of the page under links or you can click here.

My hope is to make comments on stories that we’re working on and get some feedback that we might not normally have. Twitter will add another perspective to the sites and hopefully improve our reporting. I see a lot of people from the industry at trade shows, but it’s important to have a dialogue with our readers. What do they want to read about? What trends do they see coming down the road? What are we missing? 
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Mobile Distillery, a French provider of an automatic porting platform and Hamburg, Germany-based Stollmann E&V, a developer of hardware and software for the communications technology sector, are looking at making it easier to implement the same consumer applications across different NFC platforms.

“During conversations at previous NFC events we realized that we were both working on a common goal but at different levels of the software architecture. Both of us are working to ease the use of NFC technology by smoothing out the difference in hardware or software implementations,” said a Mobile Distillery spokesperson.

Read more here.  

SCM Microsystems Inc. and Bluehill ID announced a technology and distribution agreement that targets contactless smart card, RFID and NFC markets worldwide. The partnership marks another step in SCM’s strategy to expand into the growing contactless market, and also further extends Bluehill ID’s distribution channels and technology portfolio for identity management and electronic security. 
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The Smart Card Alliance Transportation Council sees contactless fare collection systems moving forward in four cities while at the same time interest is growing for mobile NFC fare payments. This latest update is based on information gleaned from the organization’s 2009 Payments Councils Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah, in February where new officers were also elected. 
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In the second year of a partnership between the Smart Card Alliance and SourceMedia, the theme of CTST is enabling secure identity and payments in a mobile world.

CTST: The Americas 2009 will take place May 4 – 7 at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside. The conference sessions are broken down into five tracks: identity and security, payments and applications, mobile and NFC, emerging technologies, Latin America and health care.

“We’ve pulled together multiple tracks to address the different vertical markets that have the most activity in the North American and Latin American markets,” says Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance. 
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Three of Switzerland’s leading telecommunications companies, Orange, Sunrise and Swisscom, have formed a work group to compile standards that would make NFC technology easier to adopt by service providers, leading to production of more NFC-compliant phones that can be used for payments and ticketing. 
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NFC applications involving social networking sites were two of the finishers in the NFC Forum Global Competition for 2009. The winners were announced at the annual Global NFC Business & Technical Developers Summit at WIMA in Monaco and were selected from 20 finalists culled from 52 entries from 21 countries and four continents. 
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