GSM Association

Stellar line-up of speakers from Coca-Cola, Visa, Walt Disney and Yahoo! attend inaugural Americas event

May 2008, Atlanta: The GSM Association (GSMA) has announced the Top Innovators for the Americas leg of the 2009 Mobile Innovation Global Award Competition, along with additional, high-calibre industry speakers at the Mobile Innovation Marketplace – Americas, which is being held in Atlanta, Georgia, 3 – 4 June, 2008.

The Mobile Innovation Global Award Competition was created by the GSMA as part of the Mobile Innovation Market, which encourages breakthrough technology, applications and services in the mobile industry by bringing together smaller companies developing innovative mobile products, industry investors from leading venture capital firms, and senior figures from mobile operators and leading global brands.

The GSM Association (GSMA) has today published the first in a series of ‘Technical Guidelines’ white papers on mobile NFC (Near Field Communication) services, providing the consolidated views of mobile operators as input to support the standardization of NFC technology. More than twenty mobile operators, including many of the largest in the world, have been working together in the GSMA’s initiative to develop a common vision for Mobile NFC services. The initiative aims to support the development of a stable and efficient NFC ecosystem and promote interoperability, leading to standardization on a global scale.

The Mobile Operators involved in the NFC initiative serve more than 800 million mobile users. They are: Bouygues Telecom; China Mobile; AT&T (formerly Cingular Wireless); Elisa; KPN; KTF; Mobilkom Austria; NTT DoCoMo Inc.; Orange; Rogers Wireless; SFR; SKTelecom; Telefónica; Telenor; TeliaSonera; Telecom Italia; TMN; Turkcell; Vodafone and ‘3’.

Nokia joins leading operators and handset makers in global initiative to enable mobile phones to be used in retail outlets to pay for goods and services

Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone maker, and a further 10 mobile operators have thrown their weight behind a GSM Association initiative to enable the worldwide use of mobile phones for payments at retail outlets.

KPN, Maxis Communications Bhd, mobilkom austria, O2, Orange, SFR, SingTel, SKT, Vodafone and Wind have joined the 14 mobile operators* that initiated the project in February. The handset vendors in the programme include Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, which both plan to participate in the first trials scheduled to begin in October.

The GSMA’s 'Pay-Buy Mobile' initiative seeks to define a common global approach to using Near Field Communications (NFC) technology to link mobile devices with payment and contactless systems. Together with a SIM/Universal Integrated Circuit Card (UICC) card in a mobile handset, NFC can be used to enable a wide range of secure, interoperable and transparent services, such as credit and debit payments.