Tag: near field communication

Ed McLaughlin was at Money2020 and explained the future of NFC across smartphones and other devices.

At the Las Vegas 2013 Money2020 event, Ed McLaughlin, the chief emerging payments officer at MasterCard addressed the fact that in mobile payments, “a smartphone is a device, not the only device.”

He explained that transactions may be headed toward the use of smartphones, but not exclusively.

McLaughlin stated that although mobile payments are important in terms of the use of smartphones, the true focus is about building a digital network. Within the demonstrations that were made of the MasterCard technology, a smartphone was used, but so was a watch and a credit card, for example. In fact, it was mentioned that the service has already been effectively tested with Google Glass augmented reality glasses, though they did not have any specific announcement about plans for that device.

When a customer has used mobile payments two or three times, tapping the device to pay will be a habit.

MasterCard feels that by the time the customer experiences the convenience of NFC technology for mobile payments, and taps the device or card 2 or 3 times to make a purchase, he or she won’t return to using traditional credit cards. McLaughlin referred to a report that he had just received from Australia, where Kohls has experienced a growth in contactless payments of 60 percent.

The MasterCard platform uses both NFC technology and QR codes, and it offers a number of app functions and choices to provide a safe and customized experience for the user at the point of sale. This includes additional benefits such as loyalty cards and coupons. The app also provides an interesting feature that allows for a shipping option after an item has been purchased in store. This means that, for instance, if a large TV has been bought, the consumer can opt to have it shipped to their home, instead of having to transport it, themselves.

This has all been worked into the popular existing PayPass platform from MasterCard, with its tap and go NFC technology feature. It is now being combined with QR codes for added security and to allow the process to remain convenient for consumers who are becoming quite familiar with the barcode scans.

PayPal made a similar mobile payments announcement at Money2020 in which they state that they would also be integrating QR codes into their transaction process to keep security high and yet still convenient.

The strategy was used to help to provide the wireless powering of the tags.

Although when the majority of people who have heard of NFC technology think of it in terms of advertising and mobile payments, as well as pairing smartphones to other devices, it has now been made possible to use this tech for wireless powering of an E-ink display.

A team of students and researchers came together in order to create this unique high tech tag.

The team was made up of individuals from the University of Washington, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Intel Labs. It created the NFC-WISP E-Ink Display Tag, which is based on NFC technology as well as a low power E-ink panel so that Android smartphones can transfer data (both sending and receiving) as well as power without the need for any cables or wires.

The NFC technology achieves this goal through the use of inductive coupling.

By applying NFC technology in that way, it can provide power by way of otherwise passive tags. The E-ink display can then take advantage of this capability through the use of a microchip that provides wireless power harnessing and a 1mAh battery. As one can expect, the initial form of this tech doesn’t provide a tremendous amount of power, but it remains very promising for the future.

The current use of NFC technology for power transfer doesn’t provide a huge amount of power but it was capable of offering enough that it could power a 2.7 inch display with enough stored energy that it could be used to cycle through images, even when it was not actually paired with the smartphone.

As of yet, using NFC technology for that purpose is relatively useless other than considering it a way to provide power to a secondary smartphone display, but it does hold some potential for the future development of power transfer tech. The E-ink screen could end up becoming popular for things such as maps and directions and shopping lists without having to draw on your limited battery power from the power-pig of a smartphone screen. The device’s 0.5MB of memory can hold an estimated 20 images.