Wifi Revolution

Contactless smart card applications, most often touted as being useful for turning cell phones into mobile wallets, got another vote of confidence today.

 

Sony Corporation and NXP Semiconductors, signed a deal—to take effect mid-2007—forming a joint venture for the production and marketing of contactless smart card applications.

 

Specifically, the companies said they will be planning, producing and marketing “a secure chip that will include both MIFARE and FeliCa operating systems and applications, as well as other contactless card operating systems and applications.”

 

For those note familiar, NFC is a technology that combines contactless identification and interconnection, enabling short-range wireless communications between mobile devices, the companies explained.

 

NFC is interoperable with FeliCa and ISO14443 infrastructures—as well as MIFARE, which the companies described as “the most widely installed contactless smart card technology in the world with about 1.2 billion smart card chips and more than seven million reader modules sold.”

 

The two companies said they plan to continue independently developing MIFARE and FeliCa-based chips and applications, but will work together on NFC solutions.

 

Sony and NXP said that, by pulling together security and the NFC technology, the companies are creating a universal contactless IC platform designed specifically for mobile phones. The universality of the new platform gives device manufacturers and service providers around the world more freedom to design solutions, since those solutions will be compatible with an even broader range of systems.

 

“This joint venture signals the evolution of interoperable mobile services, regardless of technology platform or geography,” NXP Executive Vice President and General Manager Marc de Jong said in a statement. “Soon service providers will be able to roll out great new services to end users on a global scale, ensuring a broad range of offerings to keep customers happy wherever they are.”

 

Sony’s Corporate Executive and Senior Vice President, Hiromasa Otsuka, said that the result of the joint venture will be to “introduce customers around the world to a new lifestyle where simply touching a terminal with a mobile phone gives access to a wide range of services.”

 

To date, contactless applications on mobile phones remain largely available only in Asia. A Reuters report Monday noted that, in Japan, 12.6 million consumers already have their credit card numbers embedded in a chip in their mobiles phones, letting them make purchases by swiping the phone over a wireless reader.

 

Perhaps the Sony/NXP deal will help make that type of application more widely available.

 

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