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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

The 10-year anniversary of the official birth of NFC came and went quietly on Sept. 5, 2012.

Japan’s largest telco, NTT DoCoMo, has begun to make a key piece of its strategy for NFC known, announcing deals with MasterCard Worldwide and South Korea’s KT Corp. to enable subscribers to make payments when they roam in other countries.

Japan Airlines next month is expected to launch what is believed to be the first commercial service worldwide enabling passengers to tap standard NFC phones to pass through boarding gates, NFC Times has learned.

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.

BARCELONA – Two more chip makers, Samsung Electronics and NXP Semiconductors, are planning to introduce NFC chips that support Japan’s large infrastructure of contactless readers based on FeliCa technology.

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.

Japan’s three major mobile operators, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and Softbank Mobile, announced today they have formed the Japan NFC Consortium to help them set standards for making the move to NFC from proprietary FeliCa technology.

Users will be able to tap their Japanese contactless-mobile wallet phones on readers installed at a small number of merchant locations in the Roppongi district of Tokyo to get information on the busin

NTT DoCoMo will sell "hybrid" NFC phones that support both standard NFC and domestic FeliCa technology from Japan’s Sony Corp. when the big telco makes its planned move to NFC late next year.