The NFC Forum announced that Innovision Research & Technology plc, and STMicroelectronics have become Sponsor Members and have joined its Board of Directors.

In other member news, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB has upgraded its membership level from Associate to Principal, and nine organizations have joined as Associate and Non-Profit members. The Forum also announced that Paula Berger has been appointed Executive Director.

Formerly Principal and Associate members, respectively, Innovision and STMicroelectronics now join fellow Sponsor members HP, INSIDE Contactless, MasterCard Worldwide, Microsoft Corp., NEC, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, Inc., NXP Semiconductors, Panasonic, Renesas Technology, Samsung, Sony Corporation and Visa Inc.  

Oberthur Technologies has deployed its FlyBuy contactless stickers to three banks internationally, including one of the largest card issuers in the United States. The sticker is the latest product in Oberthur Technologies’ development of contactless payment and form factors.

Approved and developed in cooperation with MasterCard, Oberthur Technologies’ FlyBuy Sticker is a contactless payment device that can be attached to any surface including a mobile phone, PDA, MP3 player or key ring, enabling the end user to choose their very own personalized payment device. 

The six companies involved in an NFC pilot in Switzerland have deemed the three month test a success as 90% of those participating said they liked the new technology because it was convenient and easy to use. The same percentage also said they would use the technology when it became commercially available.

Credit Suisse, PostFinance, SIX Multipay, Swisscard, Swisscom and Visa Europe participated in the trial that lasted from September to November last year. Employees of Credit Suisse, Swisscard and SIX Multipay were able to use their NFC-enabled phones in company restaurants. Aim of the pilot was to test the technical and operating feasibility of contactless payments.

Read more here.  

CARTES & IDentification will be held from November 17 to 19 in Paris-Nord Villepinte. This year the show’s focus will be on authentication technology and the country in the spotlight will be Russia.

The use of plastic cards in Russia has become widespread over recent years and the deployment of equipment at point of sale is accelerating. This development of cards entails an increased risk of card piracy, trafficking and phishing, forcing banks and public-sector organizations to look for new protection solutions. 

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? 

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.