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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

Raiffeisen Bank International, one of Austria’s largest banks, is planning to launch contactless-mobile payment with microSD cards and an iPhone attachment.

With the help of NFC technology, airline passengers will routinely tap their mobile phones to pass through security checkpoints and boarding gates by 2018, predicts major airline industry IT and communications services provider SITA.

NFC chip supplier Inside Secure has released a new version of its NFC software stack, as it seeks to break rival NXP Semiconductors’ dominance of the market for NFC chips in Android phones.

Japan’s second largest mobile operator, KDDI, said it would launch Japan’s first mobile NFC service late this month with the Samsung Galaxy S II–though the service will start out small because of the lack of phones that support both standard NFC and Japan's proprietary FeliCa technology, as well as Japan's nearly nonexistent infrastructure of standard contactless readers.

The SIMalliance trade group and GlobalPlatform standards organization say they are working on what they predict will become a “de-facto standard” for the way apps on NFC phones communicate with secure elements.