Since April 2, 2010, you can pay at Starbucks Coffee with your Taipei Metro Card (EasyCard).

Wait… you can also pay in the 4,500 7-ELEVEN stores in Taiwan, in the 2,500 Family Mart store or 1,500 OK-Mart stores, at the parking lots, directly on the park meter (!), in the taxi, at MacDonald’s, at the movies, etc you name it! Basically you can pay everywhere with your EasyCard. This card used to be for the exclusive use of the Taipei Metro-Bus system. It has gradually moved out of the metro stations and spread to parkings; and from April 2010 onwards, not only will it be accepted at most retailers’ counters, but moreover on the whole Taiwanese territory. Octopus does that already! Granted, but we are talking about nearly 25 million people here (Hong Kong counts 7 million people). Advertising for the new EasyCard is massive and ubiquitous these days. They’d better invest in communication if they want to reach the 95% penetration rate that Octopus has been able to achieve in 6 years. Visa? Master? Anything to say?

Barcelona, Spain and Taipei, Taiwan – February 15, 2010. Toro Development Ldt. (TORO) and Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) are working together to develop a cutting-edge offering for mobile financial applications based on G&D’s Mobile Security Card and TORO’s Akami mobile platform. Both companies are contributing their respective expertise in hardware, firmware, middleware, mobile software, and system architecture to create a platform offering system integrators, financial service providers, and retailers fast time to market for a proven secure mobile solution. The solution will be on show in the G&D Pavilion (Avenue AV 103) at the Mobile World Congress from February 15 to 18, 2010, in Barcelona.

This new offering addresses the booming market of secure applications on mobile phones. It brings to the market a series of stand-alone solutions for secure applications that will not necessarily evolve toward near-field communication (NFC), such as mobile banking, mobile remittance and mobile ATM.

The Mobile Security Card originates from Giesecke & Devrient Secure Flash Solutions (G&D SFS), a joint venture between G&D and the flash controller supplier Phison Electronics. “G&D SFS offers secure micro-SD cards as one among a number of secure elements on the mobile phone. This is a strong sign to the financial industry that their applications can securely run on mobile. Independently from the longer-term agreements that banks and mobile network operators (MNOs) may be putting in place in preparation of NFC, banks can already educate their customers to use their mobile as a secure terminal for their daily banking operations”, says Laurent Renard, CEO of TORO.

“G&D and TORO complement each other in offering secure and convenient mobile financial applications. TORO is a company that understands the importance of both, security and the mobile user experience, and help get the best out of our products. They already make it easy, convenient, and very appealing to users to operate secure applications from mobile devices”, says Marcus Rosin, Managing Director of GD SFS.

TORO SELECTED AS FINALIST FOR SESAMES INNOVATION AWARD

Akami™ competes for best mobile application.

Hong Kong, November 9^th 2009 – TORO, the pure player for NFC mobile platform development, is pleased to announce that their product AKAMI™ as been selected as a finalist for the prestigious SESAMES INNOVATION AWARDS in the MOBILE category.

“We are proud to have been chosen as a finalist from among the 309 applications competing for the SESAMES Innovation Awards, and we salute the jury members for short-listing a startup company alongside the 3 industry giants Gemalto, Oberthur and NXP,” said Laurent Renard, Chief Executive Officer, Toro Development Limited. “Our engineers have been developing the Akami™ software suite with a true vision of the distribution of NFC services to end-users”, he added. “Our competitors for the SESAMES – but partners in business – have made the NFC technology work, and now TORO will help focus on the NFC user-experience and user relationship management, a key success factor for NFC applications adoption”.

About Akami™:

Akami™ is a complete mobile software suite that provides a User Management System for the distribution to end-users of NFC services, whether secure (i.e. payment, transport, loyalty, tickets, etc.) or non-secure (i.e. marketing, CRM, social network, games, etc.). Akami™ is a market-ready solution that comprises a mobile client (with versions for all mobile platforms: J2ME, WM, Symbian, etc.), a widget system, a SDK, and a full-featured back-office system with APIs for 3^rd parties. Akami™ addresses the markets of mobile operators and/or TSMs.

About TORO:

TORO is a startup company founded in 2007 to serve the emerging NFC ecosystem, and offer a compelling user-experience across mobile, web and the reality. TORO is positioned as the crossroads of smartcard, mobile and GUI design. TORO is also the founder and organizer of the monthly Mobile Monday events in Taipei, Taiwan. Toro Development Limited is headquartered in Hong Kong, with offices in Taipei and Paris. For more information, please visit www.toro-asia.com

We have the great pleasure to inform the NFC ecosystem that Akami, TORO’s main product, was selected among 23 candidates for the SESAMES Awards at CARTES 2009 in the category MOBILE. The winner will be unveiled on November 16th at the Théâtre de Paris, the night before CARTES 2009 starts. TORO is competing with heavyweight players in the NFC ecosystem: Oberthur Technologies, Gemalto and NXP.

Well, we are not sure of the criteria of the jury, let us just hope they like innovative startups and they understand that winning a SESAMES Award for a small (but promising) startup like TORO can make a difference, whereas it is just a matter of corporate pride for big companies.

We’ll keep you posted!!!

“NOW SAMPLING: NXP’s PN544 complies with the SWP and HCI specifications”

NXP announced this June 2nd that their PN544 NFC chipset is finally ready and available for sampling. That is the piece of information that the entire NFC ecosystem was waiting for since the GSMA officially announced that they backed Gemalto’s proposal to turn the SIM card into THE secure element! Now, handset makers will be able to start their NFC phone developments and finally flowd the market with SWP compliant handsets. Phones, phones, phones! It is said in the small NFC world that a carrier needs to propose a minimum of 3 NFC handsets to users to start launching their NFC services. That might well be (at long last) the beginning of it all.

Let’s not be too optimistic though, and let’s not underestimate the capacity of the NFC ecosystem to find themselves new problems that will delay the NFC market a little more. PN544 is almost a famous brand name, let’s hope it will be remembered as a main milestone for NFC.

I would like to comment on ping.ping, Belgacom’s initiative to launch NFC mobile payment in Belgium. They launched ping.ping a little over a month ago (after duly buying Tunz, originally a SMS-based mobile payment software start-up), and it did not make much noise, although I think what they are doing is a very smart move.

While everyone is awaiting the ever-delayed NFC phones, Belgacom’s team decided to make a bold move and whip the market a bit. They launched ping.ping (named after the shortest man on the planet – Chinese), which, for the end user, is a service that materializes as a RFID sticker on his phone, and an account on www.pingping.be.

The RFID sticker (Mifare DES-fire) is only an identifier. Merchants do have a NFC phone, but only to acquire the transaction. Merchants have a merchant ID, they the amount on they ping.ping mobile interface, and the whole batch of data goes online directly to the Belgacom servers. If the merchant’s service is activated for the user, and if the ping.ping account is loaded with enough cash, then the transaction is accepted. Yes, everything is done online. From the ping.ping website, end-users can chose which services/where they want to pay with ping.ping (parking, supermarkets, fast-food, etc.), and which account of theirs should be debited (bank account, Proximus phone bill, etc.). [How it works.pdf]

This is not our vision of NFC services, but still, Belgacom is creating a brand name, deploying services, creating habits, and – most importantly- growing a user base. And this is the beauty of the service: ping.ping sales force goes to a service provider, says a parking management company for example, they sign a deal, and Belgacom immediately grow their ping.ping user base by 30,000 people. These end-users trade-in their contactless parking card for a ping.ping sticker… They then can decide, once logged on the website, to subscribe to more ping.ping services.

So Belgacom is turning the hindrance created by the lack of phones into a competitive advantage: the longer the delay for NFC phones to be available, the larger the ping.ping user base. And when NFC phones are available in numbers, they’ll kindly propose their users to switch to “mobile ping.ping”. Brilliant! …and inexpensive (ping.ping pilot= 500 Mifare stickers vs. MNOs giving away 500 Nokia 6212 to their customers)

According to NearFieldCommunicationWorld report, Hong-Kong based Cell-Idea ( who is also Toro’s sister company) has launched “With Me”, an NFC device that adds near field communication functionality to any Bluetooth-equipped mobile handset.

Cell Idea adds NFC to any Bluetooth phone
UPDATED: Consumers can simply pair the company’s new ‘With Me’ device, expected to retail at US$25, with their existing Bluetooth phone in order to NFC-enable their handset.

Hong-Kong based Cell Idea has launched ‘With Me’, an NFC device that adds near field communication functionality to any Bluetooth-equipped mobile handset.The device works by having the capability to both communicate with the phone using Bluetooth and communicate with any reader conforming to ISO 14443 Type A, Type B or FeliCa contactless communication standards for payments, loyalty applications, ticketing, access control and more.

And Toro is proudly to partner with Cell-Idea to provide our akami as the interface for With Me.

Cell Idea, which has also developed the NFC microSD solution used in Fonelabs’ new low-cost NFC phones, has produced two demonstration videos, using a loyalty and e-wallet application developed by Toro, that give a clear idea of how the phone/NFC device combination works and llustrates the potential functionality:

Even though “With Me” is not available to the consumer market yet, but we certainly think this will definitely give NFC market a big push, provide the real NFC user experience, after all, NFC will only take off if end-users really like it.

Taipei City in innovating with the (very fast) deployment of the “U-bike” system, almost identical to the Vélib‘ system launched in Paris with great success on 15 July 2007. The service provider is Taishin Bank (!), the bikes themselves are manufactured by local world leader Giant and the payment system is managed by TSCC. The U-Bikes will initially only be available in the Taipei Xinyi district with a roll out to more locations planned for later in 2009

As of 2007, similar schemes are also in effect in other European cities, including Aix-en-Provence, Caen (V’eol), Rouen, Barcelona (Bicing), Bari, Brussels, Copenhagen, Luxembourg (Vel’oh), Lyon (Vélo’v), Nantes (Bicloo), Toulouse, Marseille Stockholm, Pamplona (Cemusa), OYBike, Call a Bike (Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Stuttgart, Munich, Karlsruhe), Copenhagen/Helsinki/Aarhus (CIOS), Oslo, Sandnes, Seville (Sevici) and Vienna. Schemes have also been proposed for London, Melbourne and Dublin. However, it is remarkable that U-bike is probably the first bike hire program in the world where your standard transit pass card is used to hire the bikes as well, thus making them an extension of the city wide public transport system.

What is certainly interesting in the case of Taipei is that “U-bike” becomes the 4th application of the now ubiquitous EasyCard launched in 2002 and managed by TSCC (Taipei Smart Card Corporation, founded in 2000), after (1) MRT and buses, (2) public parking lots, and (3) park meters on the street. The 10 million contactless cards (Mifare technology) are getting more and more popular in the Taipei area, and close to reaching the popularity of its Hong-Konguee counterpart Octopus. Payment in taxis with Easycard was abandoned after a not-so-successful trial in year 2004, and is now replaced by the Visa Paywave application (see previous post).

Taiwan is definitely comforting its position to potentially become for world leader for NFC deployment, with the 3 main mobile network operators launching their NFC services at the end of 2009, and a number of contactless schemes and infrastructures the densest in the world: Easycard, Visa Paywave, MasterCard Paypass, JCB J/speedy, MOS burger, Q-pay (7-ELEVEN), and more to come.

With very attractive prices (1st 30 minutes: Free, and every additional 15 minutes: NT$ 10 (USD 0.3 or EUR 0.25)), hopefully the “U-bike” initiative will make life in Taipei easier and healthier, and help the case for a fast and massive adoption NFC !

The largest taxi company in Taiwan, Taiwan-taxi 台灣大車隊 turns to Visa Paywave for the payment of taxi fares that usually range from the minimum fee of NT$70 (US$ 2 - EUR 1.6) to NT$400 (US$ 12.5 - EUR 9.5). The case for contactless payment in taxi seems indeed quite obvious: fares represent small amounts, taxi drivers often carry little change, people are often in a hurry, coins often drop and get lost, transactions have to be done off-line, etc. So much so that, 3 years ago, the same company did a trial with TSCC and their EasyCard. It was however not so successful because the amount stored on the Easycard is intended for much lower fares (TSCC fare is around NT$20), thus creating a situation where people would not have enough money on their Easycard to pay for the taxi fare and no possibility to top-up.

Visa Paywave solves this problem as the transaction is directly debited from the client’s account after the taxi driver does his daily settlement.

Although Visa Paywave is getting most publicity from this implementation with Taiwan Taxi, other brands can also be acquiered by the China Trust (CTCB) POS contactless reader: J/speedy (JCB), Easycard (TSCC) and Q-Pay (7-ELEVEN + CTCB)

One taxi driver said to me: “1 out of 5 customers pay with their Visa Paywave card! Very convenient”.

One more reason to push for a commercial rollout of NFC in Taiwan