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Canadian telco joint venture EnStream has signed a new three-year deal with BlackBerry, as it expands its TSM service into provisioning secure payment applications for Canadian banks.

France-based Inside Secure reported smaller operating losses for 2013, though mainly on an adjusted basis, and wrote off $3.6 million in NFC controller chips it had on hand as it continues to exit the market for the chips.

Canada-based coffee and fast-food chain Tim Hortons has launched what is believed to be the first full commercial NFC mobile-payments service using host-card emulation.

NFC Times Exclusive: Inside Secure has reorganized its business units, as it continues to refocus its strategy toward embedded security while pulling back from the NFC controller market.

While Samsung Electronics has made known a major part of its embedded secure-element strategy for its NFC phones–with its work with Visa, MasterCard Worldwide and likely other payment schemes–Samsung isn’t the only device maker planning to enable applications on its NFC phones.

Canadian debit network Interac, along with the Royal Bank of Canada, McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada and BlackBerry demonstrated what Interac billed as the first NFC-enabled debit transaction in Canada.

France-based NFC chip supplier Inside Secure said it would cut up to 20% of its global workforce following the loss of more than $30 million in 2012.

Research In Motion has unveiled its new NFC-enabled BlackBerry 10 operating system and the first two devices running the software, along with a new corporate name.

Research In Motion continues to promote its own trusted service management service–the only handset maker to offer one–announcing Wednesday approval by Visa of the service to manage secure elements on NFC phones.

Samsung Electronics' high-profile launch of branded NFC tags in the U.S. uses nonstandard technology, NFC Times has learned.