Cell Phones and a Cashless Society

Retail Partnerships are the Key to a New NFC Business Model for Mobile Payments

March 29, 2010

NearFieldCommunicationsWorld.com - Korean mobile network operator SK Telecom's new T Smart Pay service comes with more than one twist to the 'standard' NFC business model. Not only has SKT bought its way into a card issuer for the launch, but it is also signing distribution deals with leading retailers.

T Smart Pay lets customers store up to eight credit cards in their mobile phones, as well as up to 30 membership/points/mileage cards and 50 coupons, and is being offered first via discount retail chain Home Plus. The retailer will promote the new Hana SK Card payments card to customers and will also be responsible for delivering customers their new T Smart Pay SIM card.

"Then the company plans to introduce the service to other large-scale discount stores, department stores as well as franchise stores," the operator explains.

Could the model work in other countries too? Well, Home Plus is 95% owned by UK-based retail giant Tesco. And, the operator says, it plans to make "proactive efforts to enter the overseas markets to become the global leader in the field of smart payment."

Could PayPal Bump NFC’s P2P Ambitions into Touch?

March 18, 2010

NearFieldCommunicationsWorld.com - A new technology from US start-up Bump, which lets consumers use phones equipped with accelerometers to make peer-to-peer payments and share images or contact details, has been adopted by PayPal for its new Send Money service.

PayPal has launched a new service that enables consumers to make payments by simply 'bumping together' two mobile phones. Send Money can be used to make an instant peer-to-peer transfer of funds from one PayPal account to another, either between two consumers or between a consumer and a merchant or service provider such as a plumber or a market trader.

As well as a straight transfer of funds, Send Money also enables users to:

• Split a bill. This function makes it easy for users to divide up the cost of a meal for up to 20 people and quickly reimburse each other for their share of the cost.


• Collect money, by requesting funds from multiple people for a joint gift, team dues or concert tickets. "Users can send gifts of money on the spot for birthdays, anniversaries or any moment of impulsive generosity," says PayPal.


• Set reminders for recurring payments from their PayPal account.

PayPal Send Money requires a PIN or password for every transaction to help prevent unauthorised use and includes a global currency calculator. It is available from launch in 15 languages.

While PayPal's service currently works only with Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, Send Money is built on technology developed by US start-up Bump Technologies which has already introduced versions for Android devices and plans to introduce the service to other platforms in the near future.

And, while PayPal is using Bump for funds transfer only, the technology equally enables a range of other P2P transfers, such as sharing photos and contact information and interacting on Facebook.

To use the service, consumers simply download the Bump app to their mobile device and then, when they wish to make a transfer, they simply bring their phone into contact with another using a sideways 'bump' action.

"The app on your phone uses the phone's sensors to literally 'feel' the bump, and it sends that info up to the cloud," Bump explains. "The matching algorithm listens to the bumps from phones around the world and pairs up phones that felt the same bump. Then we just route information between the two phones in each pair."

"We use various techniques to limit the pool of potential matches, including location information and characteristics of the bump event," the company continues. "If you are bumping in a particularly dense area (for example, at a conference), and we cannot resolve a unique match after a single bump, we'll just ask you to bump again... if you are in Chicago, we use that info so we don't have to compare your bump with bumps coming in from Japan, Europe, New York, etc."

"When you bump, if we find a match with a phone that felt the same bump, our servers ask each phone to send up the contact information each user chose to share, but nothing more," Bump adds. "If and only if both users then confirm that the match is indeed correct will the contact information be sent down to the other person."

"Today, there are several other phones that include the sensors that Bump needs to feel bumps, but in the next few years, the vast majority of new phones will have these sensors," the company continues. "We plan to offer Bump on all of them, and Bump will work between any two of them."

Canadian mobile operators ‘plan to introduce NFC or contactless handsets within the year’
Russia looks to introduce mobile contactless in two to three years
Italian start-up introduces TouchTwits for NFC-based social networking
China UnionPay Begins Major Expansion of Mobile Payments Project
French national home care services association to roll out NFC services
Irish banks to launch NFC services in 2011?
Poland and Italy commit to contactless payments
2009 will be the year of contactless payments, says Visa Europe boss

Alcatel-Lucent Introduces Turnkey Pay-as-you-go Mobile Wallet Platform

March 23, 2010

NearFieldCommunicationsWorld.com - Alcatel-Lucent has introduced its Mobile Wallet Service (MWS), a software-as-a-service platform that enables mobile network operators to offer their customers a wide range of mobile payments services including proximity payments, mobile ticketing, international remittances, P2P funds transfer and both ecommerce and mcommerce services.

"A portfolio of access devices for proximity payment" is supported and, via the company's partnership with Clear2Pay, the Mobile Wallet Service also provides a full end-to-end transaction service including stored value account management, gateways to banks and payment networks plus direct links to the operator’s billing system. This enables operators who use the service to link consumers' mobile wallets to a full range of Visa and MasterCard credit and debit cards and to process transactions through a country's existing payments processing system.

A range of mobile loyalty and couponing services are also available and operators are able to offer consumers incentives in the form of loyalty points each time they use their mobile wallet to make a payment or a transfer.

MWS has been developed by Alcatel-Lucent's Touchatag venture, which has extensive experience with near field communication and with contactless stickers, and is delivered to operators as a turnkey solution that can also be customized to reflect the needs of specific markets. For instance, says the company, "consumers in developed countries want the convenience of paying for goods and services from their mobile phones. In growth economies, MWS can be adapted to deliver money management services via a mobile device."

A key advantage of the Mobile Wallet Service is that operators do not need to make a major upfront investment, Anthony Belpaire, Touchatag's general manager, told NFC World. Instead, service fees are paid to Alcatel-Lucent based on the number of active mobile wallet users the operator has recruited and on the volume of transactions made.

An Application Enablement API, meanwhile, enables third parties to develop new applications for the Mobile Wallet Service. Providers of existing card-based services, such as loyalty card programmes, can also use the API to integrate a mobile version of their offering into the Mobile Wallet Service.

Consumer tastes and technology can change in the blink of an eye," explains Belpaire. "Our approach allows operators to bring timely and relevant mobile wallet services to consumers, to scale with consumer demand and to dynamically add new applications."

A Personal Cell-Phone Tower

April 7, 2010

Technology Review - To accommodate explosive growth in demand for wireless data, many mobile carriers have begun touting next-generation "4G" networks. But to consistently reach good speeds, especially indoors in densely populated areas, so some carriers are starting to offer small, low-power indoor cellular access points called "femtocells."

The move from analog to digital to 3G networks was largely a matter of upgrading the technology in cell phone towers. But the explosive growth of smart phone use means that carriers need new ways of boosting bandwidth. One way to ensure high speeds, especially inside buildings where interference is common, is to use small cellular base stations (about the size of a Wi-Fi router) that route traffic over the internet.

AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint have started selling femtocells that can be used in the home to boost spotty wireless reception. Some carriers are also exploring the use of femtocells as a way to improve the performance of the their networks, since the transmitters that are small enough to be installed almost anywhere, from overhead power lines to street lamps and pay phones.

Woo June Kim, vice president of technology for femtocell manufacturer Airvana, says it may be possible to achieve speeds that are 10 times faster than 3G using existing network infrastructure, but he adds, "if you want to increase significantly beyond that, you really need what's called 'spatial reuse.' " Spatial reuse exploits the proximity of users to a base station--fewer users share each access point, but the capacity of individual access points does not change.

In the past, femtocells have been too expensive for widespread rollout, but femtocell maker Ubiquisys recently developed a $100 unit. AT&T also recently announced that it would offer a $150 femtocell.

Rich Kerr, CEO of Public Wireless, which installs femtocell infrastructure and leases access to it, says that splitting an area of wireless coverage into two smaller units using femtocells increases the wireless capacity by about 85 percent.

Femtocells also have a number of advantages over Wi-Fi, according to Kim. Users do not need to install software, such as Skype, in order to use them. The devices also offer more range (up to two kilometers when used outdoors), and they are designed to avoid interfering with other cellular transmitters by communicating with a carrier's central computer and adjusting signal strength accordingly. Femtocells can hand off voice and data transmissions to adjacent cells as a user walks or drives through a coverage area.

Public Wireless has been able to deploy cell service to areas where it would be impossible to get permission to put up large towers, says Kerr.

For example, T-Mobile asked Public Wireless to extend its coverage to Diamondhead, a large crater near Waikiki beach in Honolulu, Hawaii. "Everyone's spent millions trying to get a cell tower on that venue," says Kerr.

"We installed production-level coverage in less than one day, and that unit has been in operation for nine months."

Femtocells could also solve a problem unique to the switchover from 2G to 3G networks. Currently, when towers make the switch, the radius of their effective coverage shrinks by 20 percent, leaving holes in areas that would have previously seen overlap from multiple towers.

"That hole is almost impossible to address with any other technology," says Kerr.

Kim believes that it's only a matter of time before femtocells will be ubiquitous both in the home and in densely populated urban areas.

"Once operators get comfortable, they'll do massive rollouts," he says. "We can expect AT&T to jack up the press on femtocells in the future."

Market research iSuppli estimates that shipments of femtocells could grow from less than 600,000 this year to 40 million by 2013.

Femtocells do have a handful of disadvantages compared to the existing infrastructure. First of all, home femtocells are dependent on a user's existing broadband Internet connection. Femtocells are also less suitable for users traveling in a car or train, because calls would need to be passed between cells too often. And in rural areas, femtocells still can't compete with old-fashioned 120-foot towers with five miles of coverage in every direction.