by Victoria on July 1, 2009
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We don’t ususally post project wins. But we’re making an exception because this one has a very public profile and it really is about innovation – design innovation to be precise. We teamed up with Minima Design and have been selected to deliver part of the Mobile Phone Security Challenge set by the Design Council.
Funded by the UK government, the Design Council was set up to “demonstrate that design can play a vital role in strengthening our economy and improving our society”. There’s loads of information on their website about current projects with great aims – such as reducing healthcare associated infections with better designed furniture.
This particular challenge is part of the Design & Technology Alliance Against Crime which is “leading a programme of work to develop innovative design solutions to help prevent robbery, to crime-proof hot new gadgets and to embed public safety in the design of new public spaces”.
The challenge briefing notes set out the problem neatly. “Four billion people worldwide have mobile phones – twice as many as have credit cards – and 80% of us carry information on our handsets that could be used by criminals to commit fraud. 16% of us already keep our bank details on our phones.” Anticipating the success of mobile payments “when credit on our phones will replace the cash in our wallets” the challenge is to mitigate risk by:
— Making mobile phone handsets harder or less desirable to steal
— Making the data stored on mobile phones harder or less desirable to steal
— Making future m-commerce transactions secure and fraud proof.
Of course it would be spoiling things to reveal what our plans are at this stage. Look out for some prototypes of market-ready solutions early next year.
by Victoria on June 19, 2009
I had an excellent evening at Mobile Monday this week. I was assigned the task of presenting my work for the past year – the Proxama NFC Wallet – in just 5 minutes. Making a video proved to be a great way of getting lots of information across within the time-slot, still leaving me loads of time to talk! A total of 15 people showcased demos but as we stuck within the same groups I only managed to see four other demos – all of which were very impressive! Full details on the MoMo site.
There were plenty of interesting questions from each session. The audience is technically literate, well versed in mobile and pretty good at asking awkward questions. So – I thought it might be interesting to post some of the questions raised. I hope my answers were clear enough on the day to those who asked.
Recently I saw a demonstration which included peer-to-peer payments, why doesn’t your product include this?
This particular demo shows what’s possible using existing payment applications that are specified and certified by schemes such as Visa and MasterCard. And P2P payments are not part of the specification for these products – yet. The industry view – which we share – is that eventually P2P payments will be standard for NFC applications – but it’s not there yet. It would be simple to add P2P payment to this demo – and we have a conceptual demo that does this already – but it doesn’t fall under the payment scheme application banner
How would this application be issued to me?
Our demo is made up of two bits of software – (1) the payment application (i.e your debit or credit card) which sits on the SIM and (2) the wallet – which is the user interface software that sits on the handset. There are 3 basic approaches to issuance:
1. Everything is pre-personalised by the operator. Your payment card details are on the SIM and the wallet is on the handset when you get your phone.
2. OTA personalisation. First you load the wallet which lets you add your card applications onto the SIM
3. Phone docking. There’s been a lot of talk recently about PC based updating – encouraged by the iPhone model.
Why haven’t we seen this technology already, it exists in Japan today!
The Japanese model was made simple because NTT DoCoMo was the dominant player and had more than 50% market share. They subsidised the new handsets and rolled out NFC. The situation in Europer is more complex, with a more fragmented market.
What handsets does the Wallet operate on today, what handsets will it work on in future?
At the moment there are a couple of handsets the Wallet runs on, the Nokia 6131 and Nokia 6212, these are the two main NFC enabled handsets in production. In future we know that Nokia have another handset due for Q3 2009 – the 6216, this handset is key because it has the secure element as part of the SIM card, which is what Operators want because they own the SIM space. We also know that LG and Samsung are releasing handsets due this year, which both also contain UICC based secure elements.
I expected a lot more questioning about the security – usually this is a point of concern whenever credit-cards and payment are mentioned. I didn’t really get asked much on that, only once did I point out that it’s more secure than your physical wallet.
Big thanks to Daniel Appelquist (twitter @torgo), Helen Keegan (twitter @technokitten) and Alex Craxton (twitter @AlexCraxton) for organising. You run a very tight ship!
