News in brief from the NFC world and beyond: Twitter and Docomo add ‘touch and follow’ • Doubletwist shares songs with NFC • Airtag offers P2P loyalty • Lifera and Taztag tie up • Lockitron opens doors with NFC • DPT unveils NFC-enabled car park pay machine • SK C&C USA rebrands as CorFire • Bayer puts antennas into decorative films • Mobey Forum expands • and much more… More
The Mifare4Mobile Industry Group has announced a new roadmap for Mifare4Mobile which sets out the way ahead for the deployment of Mifare-based transportation tickets on NFC devices... More
Tourist information centres in the Spanish city of Caceres are to distribute Google Nexus S NFC phones to visitors, to allow them to access museums, receive promotional coupons and obtain information about the city’s sights. More
AT4 Wireless and Collis have teamed up to jointly offer a full range of NFC and mobile payments test solutions... More
The NFC and contactless specialist has teamed up with Infineon and Giesecke & Devrient to provide handset manufacturers with a single package that includes both an NFC controller and an embedded secure element. More
The company aims to kickstart commercial NFC services by acting as a broker between mobile network operators and service providers — Ericsson IPX plans to pay operators to rent space on their SIM cards and then sub-let it to a range of service providers. More
SK C&C USA, the US arm of Korean mobile commerce specialist SK C&C has joined international smart card and NFC specifications body GlobalPlatform... More
The new Trusted Execution Environment specification will enable a trusted window to be created on a mobile phone’s screen so that consumers can enter their PIN securely on their own phone, rather than on a retailer’s POS terminal. More
The market is beginning to move towards a situation where consumers could have NFC phones containing multiple secure elements from multiple service providers, says GlobalPlatform, raising a potentially contentious issue regarding the way in which consumers would be able to use the various NFC services on their phone. More
SIM and smart card standards body GlobalPlatform has launched a Trusted Service Manager (TSM) Working Group... More
The cards “will be sold where consumers buy memory cards today, including retail merchants and major network operators as well as new locations such as mass transit kiosks and financial institution branch locations,” says First Data, and “SideTap MicroSD cards may also come pre-bundled in handsets.” More
OPINION: Interest in near field communication is gathering pace in the financial services sector, fuelled by the arrival of NFC-enabled microSD cards and a recognition that there is a business model to be found — so long as you look for it hard enough. More
The standards body’s new Contactless Services technical document sets out how a card issuer’s brand identity will be maintained within a consumer’s mobile wallet. More
The NFC Forum has signed a series of agreements, with the GSM Association (GSMA), EMVCo and the Smart Card Alliance, designed to enable it to work more closely with each of the associations on the development of the NFC market and near field communication-based solutions... More
The three associations will design a model which will allow certification processes to be put in place to ensure that any NFC payments application will work on any platform. More
Sagem Orga and Twinlinx are introducing a mobile contactless sticker based on Twinlinx’s MyMax NFC sticker and Sagem Orga’s Java Card technology... More
Telefónica O2 Europe has become the latest company to join GlobalPlatform, as the smart card standards body’s Mobile Task Force initiative gathers steam... More
GlobalPlatform has set up a Transportation Task Force with the aim of actively contributing to the evolution of smart ticketing solutions... More
AEPM, the Association Européenne Payez Mobile, has updated the technical specifications for Payez Mobile, the NFC solution developed by the leading French banks and mobile operators that has been on test in the French towns of Caen and Strasbourg since November 2007 (see our earlier article)... More
American Express has become the latest Full Member of GlobalPlatform, the international smart card specifications body whose technical specifications for cards, devices and systems are used in more than 300 million smart cards and two billion SIM/USIM cards — with the aim of participating in the association’s mobile payments standardization efforts... More