NFC TimesThe premier source for news, analysis and commentary on
Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

Etisalat, the United Arab Emirates’ largest telco, disclosed plans to introduce NFC payment to the Gulf state, putting a MasterCard PayPass application on SIM cards in at least one NFC-enabled BlackBerry model.

The giant Subway sandwich shop chain has said it will accept contactless payment at more than 7,000 locations in the United States, as it gears up to support the Google Wallet.

U.S. office supply chain OfficeMax has announced that more than 100 of its nearly 1,000 stores are equipped to accept not only payment but also coupons and the chain's loyalty program from the Google Wallet.

While handset makers are beginning to ship more popular smartphone models with NFC inside, some key industry observers say they expect significantly fewer than 40 million NFC phones will be shipped for all of 2011.

The NFC Forum has published what observers say is a much-needed new specification to standardize the way two NFC phones or other devices exchange messages in peer-to-peer mode.

Six major phone makers will introduce NFC phones that would support the Isis wallet and mobile-commerce applications, the Isis joint venture announced today, promising to offer a larger pool of handsets than Google could offer for its own wallet

U.S. mobile carrier Sprint plans to make NFC a major focus at its 11^th annual developers' conference, to be held Nov. 2 to 4 in Silicon Valley–part of a big push the telco is making to roll out the technology.

Nokia is introducing a handful of tag-based applications in Taiwan for the planned launch of new Nokia Symbian phones there.

Visa, American Express and Discover Financial Services have agreed to work with Google to enable consumers to put their payment applications into future versions of the Google Wallet, which the Web giant launched today.

BlackBerry phone maker Research In Motion plans to enable enterprises to store their corporate badges and other access-control and ID applications on embedded chips in its NFC phones.

Microsoft has made known its support for NFC, with a demonstration of the technology in a prototype tablet at its Build developers' conference Tuesday in California.

U.S.-based chip maker Broadcom is developing a standalone NFC chip, which it could introduce before the end of the year, NFC Times has learned.