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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

Yet another veteran of Nokia’s pioneering NFC program has left the Finland-based device maker, with the departure of Jarkko Sevanto, who is heading up mobile-contactless programs for Visa in Asia Pacific, Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Handset maker HTC continued the flow of announcements of high-end handsets supporting Android and Windows Phone 8, with the unveiling last week of its Windows-based 8X.

U.S.-based Vivotech is moving closer to liquidation, with the NFC company confirming that it recently entered into an assignment for the benefit of creditors agreement, a process by which the company’s assets would be sold to pay creditors.

Nokia today introduced its first two devices running Windows Phone 8 and, as expected, both support NFC.

Samsung Electronics announced the world’s first Windows Phone 8 smartphone, the Ativ S, which supports NFC.

Even as the NFC Forum attempts to broaden the reach of its NFC touchpoint symbol, known as the N-Mark, rival marks are surfacing, threatening to present consumers with a fragmented array of NFC icons as the technology rolls out.

Brazilian online payments company PagSeguro along with Nokia has launched an NFC peer-to-peer payment service enabling users to pay small merchants and transfer money to friends using Nokia smartphones.

MONACO – Inside Secure is expected to announce as early as Friday that Nokia has selected it as NFC chip supplier for the handset maker’s first NFC-enabled Windows Phone, to be introduced in the third quarter.

MONACO – Nokia, in a surprise move, announced it will introduce its first NFC-enabled Windows Phone device in the third quarter, offering an NFC version of its low-cost Lumia 610.

The head of NFC at Nokia, Jeremy Belostock, has left the handset maker, the latest departure from Nokia’s NFC staff