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While he announced that U.S. mobile operator Sprint will introduce more than 10 additional NFC phones supporting the Google Wallet this year, Osama Bedier, who heads the wallet program at Google, revealed few other details about how the Web giant plans to boost the wallet’s market presence.

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.

NFC phone software from SIM vendor group the SIMalliance that helps phone app developers tie into the secure elements on NFC phones is getting strong support from mobile operators but not from Google, at least not yet.

U.S. mobile carrier Sprint plans to make NFC a major focus at its 11^th annual developers' conference, to be held Nov. 2 to 4 in Silicon Valley–part of a big push the telco is making to roll out the technology.

Visa, American Express and Discover Financial Services have agreed to work with Google to enable consumers to put their payment applications into future versions of the Google Wallet, which the Web giant launched today.

LONDON – Google plans to launch its Google Wallet in at least one major European city during the first half of 2012, said Osama Bedier, Google’s vice president of payments, who discounted talk of a coming NFC wallet war in either the United States or Europe.

Google is officially launching its NFC-based Google Offers service today in Portland, Ore., with executives yesterday unveiling more details of what some are calling the search giant's planned “Groupon killer.”