Near Field Communications World » On Track Innovations

Air New Zealand issues 100,000 smart stickers to frequent flyers

Sarah Clark — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:15:30 +0000

The airline has provided each of its most frequent domestic travellers with contactless stickers from OTI that can be attached to the back of their mobile phone and act as a permanent and reusable boarding pass.

Air New Zealand, New Zealand's national airline, has issued smart stickers from On Track Innovations (OTI) to all its most frequent flyers as part of a major improvement in its check-in processes at Auckland airport.

SMART STICKER: Air New Zealand is issuing contactless stickers to frequent flyers

The changes include a new state-of-the-art check-in and boarding experience, introducing a new layout and design, new kiosks that enable customers to print their own bag tags, a 'direct to conveyor belt' bag drop zone to eliminate queues, new gate scanners for 'straight to gate' check-in and boarding for customers without bags and several new technological enablers for frequent flyers.

The OTI Smart Stickers are being issued to Air New Zealand's 100,000 most frequent domestic travellers. They can attach the sticker to the back of their mobile phone and use it as a permanent boarding pass — frequent flyers then simply present their mobile phone to specially equipped kiosks or gate scanners, and their information is immediately retrieved, making the boarding process entirely paperless.

BOARDING PASS: The system uses contactless 'smart stickers' attached to passengers' mobile phones

Stickers like this are seen widely as a way to get consumers used to the idea of using their mobile phone for transactions and other advanced operations without the need for them to buy an NFC-enabled mobile phone. Will the Air New Zealand stickers be used for other functionality? "For the time being, the Air New Zealand program will not be utilizing the sticker's payment capabilities," says the official press release rather cryptically.

"The smart sticker is one of the more exciting contactless products OTI has developed," says Oded Bashan, the firm's CEO and chairman. "By simply adding a contactless sticker to a mobile device, we provide the device with more capabilities, and the issuer with more ways to communicate with their customers and add to their product offering. Air New Zealand took it a step further by offering a unique product to its customers and providing them with a superior user experience in the boarding process."

Air New Zealand's Bruce Parton explained that "We challenged ourselves 12 months ago to create and deliver a new experience that would allow our customers to move quickly and seamlessly through domestic airports. Our goal was to get rid of frustrating queues, cut customer waiting time and make checking in and boarding as quick and easy as possible."

Auckland is the first domestic airport to get the makeover, to be followed by Christchurch and then Wellington, says Air New Zealand:

New kiosks will be progressively introduced to other larger domestic airports over coming months, and gate scanners allowing customers to scan their boarding passes will be in place at all 26 domestic terminals used by Air New Zealand from 3 November. In total, 112 new kiosks and 84 gate scanners will be introduced.
Mr Parton says the airline has invested more than $30 million in the new airport experience, which is just one of a large number of changes being made to benefit domestic travellers.
"We expect the changes to be very appealing, particularly to business travellers. Those who aren't carrying baggage will be able to go directly to the gate and self-board, and those with baggage won't waste any time standing in queues," he says.
Mr Parton says some of the most exciting initiatives make use of popular technologies to streamline the boarding process.
There will be a number of new and improved options available to customers, including email, mobile phone or a permanent unique RFID identifier.
myBoarding Pass — passengers choosing their seats online will receive a boarding pass by email featuring new 2D barcode technology in addition to their e-ticket, which can be used to confirm their seat at the kiosk or directly at the gate
mPass — a boarding pass including a 2D barcode that is sent to a mobile phone and can be scanned at the kiosk or gate;
ePass — Gold Elite, Gold and Silver Airpoints members, as well as Koru members, will be provided with this RFID tag ePass to attach to the back of their mobile phone. This can be scanned at the kiosk or the gate and used as a boarding pass.

This article was first published at www.NearFieldCommunicationsWorld.com.

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Cartes 2008: NFC pops up all over the show

Sarah Clark — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:55:36 +0000

Anyone who expected to visit Cartes 2008 and find just the odd NFC application hidden somewhere round the back of a small stand lost in the outer reaches of the exhibition hall was in for quite a surprise — Near Field Communications World spotted forty companies talking NFC at this year's event...

The NFC Forum had its 'traditional' NFC Zone at Cartes & Identification 2008, the main smart card industry trade show of the year, with demonstrations available from members including Legic, Nexperts, Toppan Forms, Stolpan and others, and also held a press briefing to announce its new chairman, Sony FeliCa's Koichi Tagawa.

But, this year, NFC also had a presence in the exhibition halls that went way beyond the confines of the NFC Zone itself. In particular, contactless stickers were on display on several stands, most of the established card industry players were involved with NFC in one form or another and it became very clear that the whole Trusted Service Manager marketplace is going to become highly competitive indeed.

NFC Forum stalwarts NXP and Sony FeliCa both had substantial stands at Cartes, with Sony FeliCa making a significant impact at the show, along with its new North American manufacturer Versatile Card Technology (VCT). NXP had a particularly busy time, announcing a significant extension of its Mifare licensing deal with Renesas and providing details of the new Mifare4Mobile initiative.

Amongst the specialist contactless and NFC suppliers, Vivotech had a flurry of announcements to make. In the last few weeks, the company has supplied its NFC provisioning software to Visa for its new NFC payments trial in Guatemala, added Atari and Nintendo veteran Don Kingsborough to its board of directors and launched the ViVOpay Kiosk II, a flexible NFC-compatible contactless payment reader designed for use in kiosks, turnstiles, bus validators and other ticketing applications. Vivotech was also a finalist in the loyalty category at the Cartes show's Sesames awards with its NFC-based one-to-one marketing, location-based promotion and smart poster management system.

Card industry players

Most of the major card industry players now have an NFC offering, whether it's an NFC-enabled SIM, reader or service management solution. Oberthur launched a software development kit dubbed 'NFC in a Box' whilst Giesecke & Devrient picked up a Sesames award for its ProxSIM, the NFC-enabled SIM used in Deutsche Bahn's NFC trials.

Sagem Orga, meanwhile, announced a development deal with French start-up Neowave that will see the production of a USB 'smart object' with a contactless interface that also contains a SIM. Known as SIMply U and based on Neowave's Weneo NFC technology, the idea is that the device can act as a bridge between a subscriber's mobile phone and their PC, enabling a mobile operator to offer new, secure internet-based services.

Beyond this, says Sagem Orga, the technology partnership will also explore new use cases for such devices in areas such as transportation, payment, location-based services and entertainment.

SCM Microsystems also has an 'NFC dongle', the SCL3710, which is designed to provide a link between NFC-enabled mobile devices and computer or web applications. The company has also recently released the @MAXX Prime, also aimed at creating a bridge between a customer's mobile phone and his PC.

Gemalto demonstrated NFC applications and a new prototype handset from LG. The KU380-NFC, currently available for demonstration purposes only, uses STMicroelectronics' ST21NFCA system-on-chip and features both PayPass contactless payment capabilities via a Gemalto (U)SIM card and built-in contactless reader functions.

STMicroelectronics also has a new NFC chip, the ST33F1M, the first in a new ST33 family targeting the high-end SIM market and based on the SC300 highly secure version of the ARM Cortex-M3 32-bit core. The new chip features 1.2Mbytes of embedded Flash memory with 30Kbytes of RAM and an SWP (single wire protocol) interface for NFC.

Elsewhere amongst the chip manufacturers, Infineon had a prototype of a new Secure Element on show, alongside its SLE 88 family for Mobile NFC — smart card microcontrollers with SWP (Single Wire Protocol) and Mifare interfaces — as well as its my-d NFC chip for Type 2 NFC tags.

Samsung also has a new NFC chip on the horizon, with a launch date set for the first quarter of 2009, and brought Korean IT specialists SK C&C along to Cartes to demonstrate the development work the company has been doing with the µSIMneo NFC-enabled USIM.

Visa and MasterCard also had large stands, predominantly promoting their respective contactless PayWave and PayPass solutions, but both also had mobile payments experts on hand to discuss NFC as well.

And, on the payment terminals front, the 'big three' of Verifone, Hypercom and Ingenico all now offer NFC-compatible contactless card readers.

The product evaluators, consultants and testers have also moved firmly into the NFC space with Collis, Comprion and Soliatis all offering NFC testing and evaluation solutions at the show. FIME, meanwhile, announced that it has started working in partnership with Inside Contactless in a bid to identify and resolve potential conflicts in the interoperability of NFC devices and to develop a comprehensive process, support and service portfolio for testing and certifying NFC mobile handsets.

Stickers

Contactless stickers seemed to be everywhere with both established supplier On Track Innovations and Inside Contactless demonstrating products. Whilst, for most, the idea of a contactless sticker attached to the back of a mobile phone is a very long way from being true NFC, their potential as a way to acclimatise consumers to the idea of using their phones to make a payment and to leapfrog the need to have an installed base of NFC-enabled handsets before a payments system can be introduced is clear.

Inside's new contactless stickers were being demonstrated by both Inside Contactless and US card manufacturer CPI Card Group, which has signed a manufacturing agreement with Inside that will see it produce the new payment stickers in the US. CPI says it expects to ship several million stickers over the next year and is in talks with ten top US financial institutions. And, in a separate agreement, HID Global signed up with Inside to manufacture MicroPass contactless prelaminates in the US (which CPI will then turn into finished stickers).

Twinlinx, meanwhile, was generating a lot of excitement with its My-Max prototype, a sticker that combines a Bluetooth receiver, NFC transmitter and a chip which adds a layer of encryption. Developed in partnership with Mobile Distillery, My-Max is designed to let any Bluetooth-enabled handset act as a fully-featured NFC device. To create the solution, Mobile Distillery worked with Twinlinx to create a Java ME layer which can access Twinlinx's Bluetooth NFC module, called My-Max. This module, which takes the form of a small sticker that sits on the back of the handset, combines a Bluetooth receiver and NFC transmitter, as well as a chip which adds a layer of encryption, making sure any data sent using the module is secure.

And Chinese smart card manufacturer Watchdata caused a lot of interest with its SIMpass 'Single Card Near Field Communication (SC-NFC)' solution. Already extensively field tested in China and Thailand, SIMpass comes in two versions. In the first it is built into a handset as a secure element and in the second it is retro-fitted to existing handsets (the company says it is compatible with 80% of handsets). Here, the antenna is connected to the SIMpass module and the SIMpass module itself is inserted as normal into the SIM slot on the phone. Attached to the SIM, though, is the antenna and the user simply removes the back cover of the phone and then places the antenna between the battery and the back cover where it can be kept securely.

Trusted service managers

There was lots of activity in the Trusted Service Manager (TSM) space, an area that seems to get more complex by the week. Existing suppliers Venyon and Gemalto were there, of course, along with Bell ID, which has since announced it is working with British mobile banking services provider Monitise to establish a shared trusted service manager approach for NFC systems.

ABnote was also talking trusted service managers at the show, after announcing its entry into the TSM space with the creation of a new partnership with Datacard called Redwave Solutions. The new company plans to create a global trusted service manager and will offer NFC application and support services via a network of value added resellers and secure processing centers.

Also being demonstrated on the ABnote stand was the new remote application management solution for NFC that ABnote subsidiary Proxama has developed in conjunction with Aconite. The new solution allows a customer to do everything from cancelling the payment application because their phone has been lost or stolen to adding a ticketing application or an access control facility for a new job, all over-the-air.

• Did we miss your company? If you were demonstrating NFC at Cartes but we missed you out, please let us know! You can leave a comment below or email news@nearfieldworld.com and we'll add you in...

This article was first published at www.NearFieldCommunicationsWorld.com.

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