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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

While Nokia last month finally turned on the NFC features of its first Symbian NFC phone, the C7, the handset maker apparently is not planning to enable all of its remaining Symbian smartph

At least 20% of smartphones will support NFC by 2014–equating to nearly 300 million phones, according to a new report by UK-based Juniper Research.

The U.S.-based Identive Group announced today its ACiG Technology unit has been selected as exclusive supplier of NFC tags for the Google Places service in Austin, Texas.

The two UK mobile operators that have announced plans to launch NFC services this year, Everything Everywhere and Telefónica O2 UK, are not yet committing to awarding the planned "Olympics Phone" from Visa Europe and Samsung Electronics a spot in their NFC lineups for next year, but they will at least give the phone an internal tryout.

Reuters is reporting that Dutch chip maker NXP is not in talks , its chief executive said on Friday, although he would consider an offer like the one Texas Instruments Inc made for National Semiconductor Corp.

Spain’s La Caixa bank has installed what it boasts are the world’s first contactless ATMs, which enable customers to tap cards or NFC phones to withdrawal money, after entering PIN codes.

The Isis joint venture, led by big U.S. mobile carriers AT&T and Verizon Wireless, has announced the location of its first NFC pilot next year, Salt Lake City, Utah. And NFC Times has learned that a second pilot city is also planned, which likely will be Austin, Texas.

France-based point-of-sale terminal vendor Ingenico today announced it has agreed to buy the U.S. POS terminal business of competing vendor Hypercom, in anticipation of NFC rollouts.

U.S.-based vendor Vivotech could be making a play for a share of the point-of-sale terminal market and the hoped-for boom in NFC-based mobile commerce at the physical point of sale in the United States.

In another sign that Google is serious about NFC, the Internet search giant has joined the NFC Forum standards and trade group as a voting member, the forum announced today.

Vivotech Inc. is planning an initial public offering for as early as 2012, Chief Executive Officer Mick Mullagh said. (San Francisco Chronicle) 

NXP Semiconductors, supplier of NFC chips and software for Android smartphones, has developed its own Android app for those phones–enabling users to write content to NFC tags.