Regional sites:
Specialized sites:
Extract from 2008 Winter Review magazine
Business opportunities presented by using NFCenabled mobile phones for
contactless payment,
transport ticketing, loyalty and
other exciting new services greatly interest mobile operators and service
providers in the banking, transport and retail sectors. NFC is a marketer’s
dream come true, opening up a world of new possibilities for “high touch” value-added
services. These include smart posters that provide on-the-spot wait times and
neighborhood maps, electronic coupons and other interactive promotions.
A central issue for large-scale rollouts, however, is: how do you create a
mobile payment “ecosystem” that makes it easy for banks and mobile operators to
work together? Who is taking the lead in linking Mobile Network Operators (MNOs)
with service providers?
NFC is a short range (4 inches/10 cm) wireless connectivity technology that
evolved from a combination of existing contactless identification and
interconnection technologies. Operating at high frequency (13.56 MHz), it
transfers data at up to 424 Kbits/second. NFC provides intuitive, simple, and
safe communication between electronic devices. It was first released in 2004 and
the NFC Forum founded by Sony, Philips and Nokia worked to establish it as a
high technology standard.
NFC technology has many dimensions, but two are essential to enabling all of these potential applications on mobile handsets: security, and the user interface. Of course, since markets around the world operate in different ways, there are also numerous options to enable these variations to be addressed. In the NFC standards, security is managed by a “secure element” (SE). The SE shares mobile functionality with the NFC chipset, which manages communications. The SE hosts the fire walled applications and user credentials, and controls security and cryptography using an onboard microprocessor and software.
There are three ways to implement the SE:
