Industry leaders establish MIFARE4Mobile Industry Group

SINGAOPORE: Seven leading players in the Near Field Communication (NFC) ecosystem, Ericsson, Gemalto, NXP, Oberthur Technologies, STMicroelectronics, Venyon, a company in the Giesecke&Devrient group, and ViVOtech have joined forces to form the MIFARE4Mobile Industry Group.

The aim of the group is to enable its members to collaborate and work together to standardize and advance the uniform management of MIFARE applications on NFC-enabled secure elements, such as SIM cards, and mobile phones.

MIFARE has become the most widely adopted contactless technology on the market today and is an essential element in public transportation schemes, ticketing systems and access management around the world. MIFARE4Mobile is a technology, which has been developed by NXP and is used to manage MIFARE-based services in NFC mobile devices, from the over-the-air installation to the end-user interaction via the user interface of the mobile phone.

By bringing together some of the key players in the NFC ecosystem, the group will act as a platform to provide future direction, discuss experiences and share best practices to ensure evolution, interoperable development and implementation of the MIFARE4Mobile technology.

“The creation of this new industry group provides further impetus to the development of NFC applications for mobile phones especially given MIFARE’s reach as a key contactless platform,” said Jonathan Collins, principal analyst, ABI Research “As SIM-based NFC phones come to market, greater collaboration by all stakeholders to remove development and interoperability barriers in existing contactless infrastructures will help drive NFC adoption.”

“The MIFARE4Mobile technology enables mobile network operators, trusted services managers and service providers to seamlessly leverage NFC-enabled mobile phone services on the existing vast MIFARE infrastructures around the world,” said Dr. Nav Bains, Senior Director Mobile Money, GSM Association. “Increased collaboration by some of NFC’s most influential stakeholders will support the creation and facilitate the integration of business for the mobile network industry related to NFC-based services.”

Over the next few months, the MIFARE4Mobile industry group will further develop the specifications supporting MIFARE DESFire technology and multiple Trusted Service Managers, following the initial MIFARE4Mobile release from late 2008 supporting MIFARE Classic technology. Licences for the MIFARE4Mobile Interface specifications are free of charge.

As an increased number of companies begin to develop their own NFC applications to support transactions such as ticketing, there is an increased need for collaboration with other partners in the ecosystem to enable interoperable over the air configuration of SIM cards and handsets.

This process automatically facilitates the activation, updates, provisioning and lifecycle management of contactless mobile services. The MIFARE4Mobile industry group, which includes both hardware partners and trusted service managers, will actively support the global adoption of NFC and the needs of all stakeholders.