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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

Anssi Vanjoki is reportedly the man who chose Nokia’s signature ring-tone–once so ubiquitous it was difficult to get through a day without hearing it several times, chiming from subscribers’ pockets.

Two prototypes of the planned fourth-generation iPhone have now leaked out, and that is not counting the white front panel believed to belong to the next iPhone that surfaced in Taiwan last week.

Well, it started small, as these things usually do.

While Apple has retrieved the prototype of its fourth-generation iPhone that a careless engineer apparently left on a bar stool in the Silicon Valley hamlet of Redwood City last month, there are no reports yet of how the company is going to prevent similar screwups.

It is coming up on six years since NTT DoCoMo launched the first of its contactless wallet phones, and we have to conclude that the rollout has not been successful.

U.S.-based Citigroup recently made a big deal out of the results of its large NFC trial held in Bangalore, India, last year, which showed transactions soared­–by as much as 329% among one subset of users.

For at least the past six months to a year, the big card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide, have been reorganizing their innovation teams–much of it behind the scenes–as they try to avoid missing out on the opportunity offered by mobile payment.

The fact that Visa Inc. went outside the organization, and outside the bank-payments industry entirely, for its new head of mobile says much about the scant progress Visa has made in its mobile initiative the past couple of years, according to observers.

If there is one thing the big U.S. telcos and banks seem to agree on is that it’s possible to roll out contactless-mobile payment in America without working together.

In the competitive U.S. mobile market, the big carriers, especially the top two, Verizon and AT&T, are not above calling out their rivals by name in television commercials–rather frequently, in fact–pointing out the inadequacies of the other’s network while promoting the advantages of their own.