Starwood Hotels picks Bluetooth for mobile room keys that work on smartphones and Apple Watch

Starwood's SPG Keyless Bluetooth mobile key

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide has unveiled a mobile keyless entry system that will allow guests to use smartphones to unlock rooms using Bluetooth at 150 hotels around the globe by early 2015. The service will also be available via an Apple Watch app when the new wearable device ships next year, the hotel chain has told NFC World+. More



What's New in Payments

Patent provides insights into the inner workings of Apple Pay

Apple Pay patent application

A newly published Apple patent application provides insights into how the iPhone maker’s new Apple Pay service will work, how the company has optimized the iPhone’s NFC capabilities to ensure the best possible user experience at the point of sale, and how secure payment credentials will be provisioned onto secondary devices such as the Apple Watch... More




What's New in Payments

How Apple will generate revenues from mobile payments begins to become clear

Apple Watch

An innovative biosensor security function built into the Apple Watch and the Touch ID fingerprint sensor in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus will work in combination with NFC and tokenization to provide additional security to Apple Pay transactions, it is now becoming clear — giving Apple the ability to negotiate special deals with card issuers that will generate new revenues for the Cupertino company... More



NFC World

No support for carriers’ NFC SIMs in Apple devices?

Softcard

Softcard, the US carrier-backed NFC venture formerly known as Isis, won’t have access to the NFC support in the new iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Watch until 2015, a blog post by CEO Michael Abbott suggests — and, even then, it looks as though it won’t be via a conventional NFC-enabled SIM... More