NFC is used primarily for enjoyable activities, like buying things, sharing content and making QR codes feel old. But Japanese company Elecom is looking to change all that with a compact keyboard that exploits NFC for productivity. The silicon menace…
If you’re counting down the days till the Wii U is released, you might recall that back in January Nintendo chief Satoru Iwata said the console will ship with an NFC chip inside. Well, you can now get a taste of how games will incorporate that featur…
With the rapidly expanding proliferation of Near-Field Communication (NFC), concerns about its security and privacy are growing right along with it. There’s plenty of worries fluttering about that personal information stored in NFC tags and mobile p…
NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank have created the “Japan Mobile NFC Consortium,” which will help the three carriers coordinate and adopt an international NFC standard. Currently, all three operators offer an NFC service dubbed Osaifu-Keitai (wallet phone) which uses a contactless-IC smartcard that’s called FeliCa. Unfortunately, the technology doesn’t work overseas where other carriers use Type A or Type B NFC standards, which means Osaifu-Ketai won’t function properly for NTT DoCoMo, KDDI or SoftBank customers hoping to use their phones for mobile payments overseas. The three carriers hope they can work with handset makers and vendors to encourage the adoption of Type A and Type B NFC standards. The consortium also aims to “create an environment in Japan where service
Hoping to add more punch to the standard mobile banking app, mFoundry has announced that it will be making MasterCard’s NFC feature PayPass available in its financial apps. What that translates to for the mobile banking user is a quick and easy way t…
Spanish wireless carrier Telefónica Digital announced Wednesday that it has partnered with Research In Motion on a new NFC-based mobile wallet pilot in Spain. The carrier provided 350 of its employees with NFC-enabled BlackBerry smartphones that are pre-loaded with its Telefónica Wallet application. The phones can be used to purchase goods and services at local retailers, or to open doors at the Telefónica’s headquarters with a simple tap to another NFC sensor. Read on for more. “We have chosen the BlackBerry solution for this pilot because of the security that the platform brings,” Telefónica Digital chief operating officer Julio Linares said. “RIM’s participation has been important for this pilot project, and we are now planning to extend the project to more and more
Entering a 16-digit credit card number may be a thing of the past with a new initiative from MasterCard and Intel, which allows users to checkout online by tapping a PayPass-enabled card, tag or smartphone to their Ultrabook. Calling the checkout “s…
It’s another nail in the coffin of expensive, dirty, smelly physical cash and coins. PayPal has released the 3.0 version of its Android app and, through that, users can directly exchange money from one NFC-equipped phone to another. Just add the Req…
Nokia is still champing at the bit when it comes to creating the so-called three horse race, but the Finnish mainstay has another three word secret weapon up its sleeve: NFC. In an interview with Electronista, the company’s VP of Location and Commer…
Market research firm In-Stat released a report on Monday that suggests NFC chip shipments will grow dramatically during the next several years as an increasing number of mobile devices adopt near-field communications (NFC) technology. In-Stat said NFC chip shipments will surpass 1.2 billion units by 2015, the same year the technology is expected to reach a 30% global penetration. “As the costs of NFC chips decline, and NFC radios are combined with other chip functions, the cost to integrate NFC into handsets will be outweighed by the benefits,” In-Stat research director Allen Nogee said. “The growth of combo chips will also allow NFC radios to piggyback on technology that already has significant penetration in the market. For example, Bluetooth radios,
