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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

Google’s new cloud-based wallet will not hurt demand for trusted service management services, contends Gemalto CEO Olivier Piou, who also said he sees little threat to NFC rollouts from such cloud-based mobile-payment services as those planned by Square and PayPal.

DeviceFidelity relaunched its direct-to-consumer microSD mobile-payment product moneto, Tuesday, following suspension of the product earlier this summer.

Google Wallet product manager Robin Dua said the company expects more payment card issuers to soon announce support for the wallet–enabling their customers to easily add their cards to the NFC-enabled cloud-based wallet.

Around 2,000 Czech consumers will be able to tap for purchases with a Visa payWave application stored on their SIM cards, in the latest NFC m-payments project to use the Samsung Galaxy S III.

Two more mobile operators in Singapore have announced the commercial launch of NFC payment services, which they say will enable subscribers to tap to pay on contactless point-of-sale terminals throughout the island city-state.

More than a dozen large U.S. merchants, including Wal-Mart Stores, Target, Best Buy and 7-Eleven, have formed a company to offer consumers mobile payments and customized offers, an initiative that would compete with Google Wallet, Isis and other mobile wallets.

Marks & Spencer, one of the UK’s largest retailers, is reportedly the latest merchant to adopt contactless payment.

Australian bank Westpac, along with MasterCard Worldwide, today launched an NFC trial that puts a MasterCard PayPass debit application onto SIM cards that run in the Samsung Galaxy S III.

After more than a two-month delay, members of a government-backed NFC consortium in Singapore made up of vendors, telcos and service providers say they are ready to launch the first of their planned commercial NFC services in coming weeks.

Google has unveiled the much-anticipated revamp of its struggling Google Wallet–a cloud-based version that opens up the wallet to cards from all major U.S. payment brands, but which continues to use NFC to enable consumers to tap to pay and redeem offers in physical stores.

Motorola Mobility will soon release its first commercial NFC phone, an upper-end Android LTE smartphone that U.S. mobile carrier Sprint plans to introduce.

U.S.-based contactless reader and NFC software vendor Vivotech has told employees that it plans to cease operations, NFC Times has learned.