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Archive for December, 2009
Swiss farmer tests unmanned NFC retail payments system
2 years ago
SCAN, CHECKOUT, PAY: Farm produce buyers serve themselves with NFC phones in an unmanned shop
A Swiss farm shop has installed a self-service NFC system which local shoppers can use to gain access to the shop, to scan RFID price tags and then pay for their purchases.
Eighty customers of a farm shop in the Zurich region of Switzerland have been equipped with NFC phones that automate the process of shopping for locally produced farm produce.
Unmanned farm shops are common in the region. Traditionally, local shoppers simply let themselves into the shop, work out the price they should pay for the goods they choose and then leave the money in an ‘honesty box’ for the farmer to collect later.
In the new system, the NFC mobile phones become an electronic shopping basket, cash till and access control key. Shoppers can gain access to the farmer’s shop around the clock by opening the door with a touch of their mobile phone. They then simply touch the RFID price tag on each product to store the item and price information in a shopping basket application on the phone. This keeps a running total of how much they owe the farmer and, when their shopping is complete, they touch their phone to a checkout tag in the farm shop to complete the purchase.
The project, known as ‘Touch’n pay’, has been developed by Austrian NFC specialists Nexperts together with a number of partners. Mobile payments developer e24 is providing the backend payments processing solution and the project is also being supported by mobile payments provider Six Multi Solutions. Winter AG is providing the OTA provisioning and personalisation services and Legic provided the contactless access technology with their partner Sea. The Mobile Lab from advertising agency Transformer is providing end-user communications and other partners in the project include Alliera and the University of Applied Sciences, Northwestern Switzerland which will be collecting and analysing the results of the test.
The system will give the partners a deeper insight into how consumers use NFC in payments applications: “The experience gathered from this project will help us to streamline the user interfaces for a mobile wallet,” explains Kurt Schmid, CEO of Nexperts, and e24′s CEO Alexander Schümperli adds “To experience how our products are used is of great interest for us to optimise our services better for the customer needs.”
Nokia: NFC oyster payments mainstream by 2012
2 years ago
Nokia is pushing for NFC (Near field communication) tech inside mobiles, hard. It wants to get you casually swiping your handset over a payment point, Oyster card style, to wirelessly pay for train trips, snacks and more, and now it says the kit will be standard by as soon as 2012.
Nokia needs to up its game in a big way next year, but one tech area it’s good to see Espoo leading the way in is mobile NFC tech, so you can use your phone as a wallet to buy small items quickly and easily. We’ve seen it built into Nokia handsets like the 6216 Classic, and it’s a major feature of the new Symbian, but now the Finnish phone giant is talking roll out times.
Symbian getting Oyster tech built in!
As part of that roll out, Nokia will launch the kit across a range of its phones as soon as next year, a source told the publication. “In Q3 and Q4 of next year we will see Nokia going into NFC in a big way. They will be bringing forward a lot of phones with embedded NFC,” the source claimed.
This is the first we’ve heard about a timeline for Nokia’s NFC kit shipping across its whole line, but with a new look Symbian promised for around the same time, we’re hopeful it’s the start of a resurgence for the company, design wise.
According to a report in Mobile Magazine:
Nokia Industry Collaborations VP Mark Selby told Mobile: “Nokia is anticipating multiple NFC-enabled devices, which won’t all be at the high end of the market. Our plan is to see NFC in lots of devices, not just smartphones.”
Selby declined to say when or how many NFC devices Nokia plans to launch, but said he anticipated that UK consumers will be widely using NFC devices by 2012.
One source close to Nokia said: “In Q3 and Q4 of next year we will see Nokia going into NFC in a big way. They will be bringing forward a lot of phones with embedded NFC.”
