Telstra, National Australia Bank and Visa have joined forces to test out “near field communications” (yet to be branded) a technology which allows users to pay for goods by placing their mobile phone on a reader.
The trial will take place in Melbourne at the start of 2008, with around 250 users who are customers of Visa, Telstra and NAB. The experiment will involve a number of the NAB’s employees and small number of members of the public. Such contact-less payment technology on phones and credit cards is already popular in Asia, where Sony’s Felica NFC system is used by operators including the Japanese giant NTT DoCoMo.
DoCoMo sells “osaifu keitei” or wallet phones, with NFC functionality embedded. Around 20 million of the devices have been shipped and 200 million NFC chips have been shipped around the country, mostly on smartcards. Anyone with a “wallet phone” can use it as a credit card after DoCoMo launched its own card brand. In Europe, however, the technology has been slow to get started and remains largely in the pilot phase in most countries where it has been deployed.
According to industry analysts ABI Research, by 2012 around 292 million handsets or just over 20 percent of the global mobile handset market will come with built-in NFC capability
(story from CNET)
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