Paying With Your Cell Phone Finally Hits US Shores…Again?

Cell Phones — 30 January 2008

NFC Contactless Payment
NFC, or Near-Feild Commuincation has been used for a long-ass time in many Asian countries. According to MobileBurn Sprint Nextel will soon begin trial runs of NFC with the BART (San Fran’s ‘Bay Area Rapid Transportation’) and participating Jack In the Boxes. In addition to paying for subway rides and burgers, Sprint customers with the appropriately equipped handsets, will be able to receive advertisements and discounts. Compatible handsets are manufactured by Samsung and the payment system is ran by Western Union. Philips ran some trial runs of this back in 2005, but I’m not sure if it really went anywhere. SanDisk also announced memory cards that included the NFC technology back in May, 2006, but that’s the last I saw of this.

This news comes on the heals of Inside Contactless announcing an initiative to rollout contactless payment to 1.3 billion users throughout the world, including the US.

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Christen Costa

Grew up back East, got sick of the cold and headed West. Since I was small I have been pushing buttons - both electronic and human. With an insatiable need for tech I thought "why not start a blog focusing on technology, and use my dislikes and likes to post on gadgets."