Smart Cards, Smart Phones and a Cashless Society

NFC-enabled Cell Phones Replace Room Keys and Eliminate Check-in at Swedish Hotel

November 3, 2010

NearFieldCommunicationsWorld.com - Access control giant Assa Abloy, Choice Hotels Scandinavia, mobile network operator TeliaSonera, hotel door key specialists VingCard Elsafe and TSM solutions provider Venyon — part of the Giesecke & Devrient group — have joined forces for a pilot test that will see hotel room keys being replaced with NFC-enabled mobile phones.

The pilot is taking place at the Clarion Hotel Stockholm in Sweden and aims to discover how well guests and hotel employees take to the idea of using NFC for a variety of hotel services.

For the trial, selected hotel guests will receive an NFC-enabled Samsung S5230 mobile phone. They will then book their hotel room in the usual way and receive their booking confirmation on their mobile phone. Ahead of their arrival at the hotel, they will then receive a welcome message and a reminder to check in to their room via their mobile phone. Once checked in, their hotel room key is sent to the phone over-the-air, enabling them to go straight to their room without checking in at the front desk.

At the end of their stay, guests will also check out with their NFC phone by touching it to RFID tags located around the hotel or via the mobile key application on their handset. The digital hotel room key stored in the phone is then automatically deactivated.

"NFC technology allows us to offer our customers a new better and more comfortable hotel experience as they can use their mobile phone as a room key," says Svein Krakk, CIO of Choice Hotels Scandinavia, the owner of the Clarion and a further 170 hotels in Scandinavia. "This is the beginning of a number of areas where we will be able to offer new added value to our customers."

The four month pilot starts this week and plans call for the experience gained during the pilot to be used to enhance and expand the service to other hotels as well as to commercial and residential buildings.

The technology being used in the trial is based on a scalable secure delivery infrastructure for mobile keys that has been developed by Assa Abloy. The system includes the back office infrastructure required to manage the distribution of door keys and a mobile key application that resides on the customer's NFC phone. This stores their door keys and, for travel applications, also provides the user with information about their hotel bookings.

The mobile key application is designed to be distributed to users over-the-air, using technology provided by Venyon. It is JavaCard 2.2.2 compatible and uses the JSR 177 security protocol to ensure the end-to-end secure management of the distributed keys.

"Keys are going mobile," says Daniel Berg, vice president and general manager of Assa Abloy Mobile Keys. "At Assa Abloy we totally support this convergence and are proud to provide the world's first complete mobile key service utilizing NFC technology."

NFC Tag Reading Added to Wide Range of Cell Phones, Enabling Consumers to Make Mobile Payments in Stores and on Public Transport

November 11, 2010

NearFieldCommunicationsWorld.com - NTT Docomo has begun the world's first mass market deployment of mobile phones with NFC tag reading capabilities. Sixteen of the operator's new range of mobile phones and a number of existing handsets will be able to perform both Osaifu-Keitai mobile contactless payments functions and NFC tag reading from next week.

Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo has built NFC tag reading capabilities into sixteen of the new mobile phone models it announced last week and is to make the functionality available to a number of existing phones which support the Osaifu-Keitai mobile payments service via a software download. The move marks the first time that mobile phones equipped with the ability to read NFC tags have been deployed in volume anywhere in the world.

The phones will be able to read FeliCa Lite RFID tags, Type 3 of the four tag types that meet the NFC Forum's tag reading standards ...

The iC Tag Reader app will be available for customers to download from 15 November.

Osaifu-Keitai was developed and launched by NTT Docomo in 2004. It uses a technology similar to NFC in terms of enabling consumers to make payments in stores and on public transport by simply touching their mobile phone to a POS terminal. Osaifu-Keitai is built on a proprietary technology, however, with chips embedded in mobile phones being manufactured exclusively by Sony FeliCa. And, until now, the phones could function only in card emulation mode.

Rival operators KDDI and Softbank Mobile also currently provide Osaifu-Keitai compatible mobile phones to their customers but it is not yet clear if the tag reading application will also be made available to their subscribers. In July, the two operators signed a deal that will see them moving away from NTT Docomo and Sony FeliCa's proprietary technology and working with SK Telecom to introduce NFC standard technology to both Japan and Korea.

NTT Docomo is also expected to make the switch to NFC standard technology in the future, although the new NFC tag reading service may enable it to delay the move. A report in Japanese business newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun last week, for instance, suggests that the operator is now looking to move to NFC in 2013.

Pulse Unveils New Way to Add an NFC Antenna to a Mobile Phone

November 1, 2010

NearFieldCommunicationsWorld.com - The electronic components supplier's new 15mm x 20mm x 5mm NFC antenna can be incorporated into a single module that also houses the phone's main mobile communications antenna, making it easier for a handset manufacturer to build near field communication functionality into a device.

Electronic components supplier Pulse Engineering has announced a new NFC antenna product that can be snapped into the same module within a mobile phone that houses its main GSM/WCDMA mobile communications antenna.

One of the issues handset manufacturers face when designing phones with built-in NFC functionality is the large form factor of a standard NFC loop antenna. For its new antenna, however, Pulse has taken a different approach and come up with a product that, instead, has a much smaller but deeper footprint.

The new NFC Stamp antenna measures 15mm x 20mm x 5mm deep and is designed to be integrated into the back cover of the main antenna housing. That way, both the NFC antenna and the main antenna can be fitted inside a 40mm x 21mm x 5mm module, enabling both 13.56MHz near field communication and frequency ranges of 824-960MHz and 1710-2170MHz for wireless connectivity using GSM and WCDMA to be built into the same device.

Pulse's NFC Stamp antenna can read tags with diameters ranging from 15mm to 65mm at distances ranging from 5mm to 20mm and, the company says, when testing with rectangular tags measuring up to 86x53mm, the performance is comparable to that of a large loop antenna measuring 110mm x 42mm.

Engineering samples are now available direct from Pulse.