NXP and Barcelona Mobile World Capital to accelerate NFC market

SINGAPORE: NXP Semiconductors N.V. has joined the Mobile World Capital Barcelona Foundation to further deploy NFC services around the world.

Working together, NXP, the MWCapital and GSMA will facilitate access to NFC technology to new ecosystem players including public administrations, transport operators, system integrators, reader and card manufacturers, advertising companies and gaming businesses among many others.

NXP, the co-inventor of NFC technology and global leader in Identification with markets such as eGovernment, transport, ticketing and payments, launches its m-Knowledge Center in the framework of the Mobile World Capital Barcelona.

This center is a global competence team of technical experts offering advanced technical training services, application and design support, project management and technological consulting in all areas related to contactless and NFC application for any company wanting to leverage the mobile revolution.

Launched by the GSMA, the Mobile World Capital Barcelona and now also NXP are at the core of an emerging contactless payment cluster, working to improve the cooperation between companies, as well as to enhance awareness of new mobile technologies.

Supported by the GSMA, NXP and the MWCapital are committed to increasing adoption and development of NFC related markets and applications for the entire mobile ecosystem and ultimately, the end user.

On a worldwide scale, the m-Knowledge Center will act as an intelligence pool for new entrants into the NFC ecosystem seeking support to quickly kick start the development and deployment of NFC services and to take advantage of NFC revenue generating opportunities.

“We believe in the power of NFC. It adds security and convenience to the mobile lifestyle and many major GSMA members are preparing NFC rollouts,” said John Hoffman, CEO of GSMA Ltd (promoter of the Mobile World Congress), and VP of Mobile World Capital Barcelona.

“Working with NXP, we will attract new players to join the NFC ecosystem and generate new services that mobile network operators can offer to their customers. The entire NFC ecosystem gets access to NXP’s proven development tools as well as consulting to easily incorporate NFC technology into their solution portfolios. Together, we will set out to explore the new mobile horizon.”

“We are combining NXP’s deep application knowledge and the GSMA members’ understanding of the mobile end user - the perfect set-up to push the NFC market evolution to the next level. Now that device manufacturers are bringing hundreds of millions NFC chipsets in hundreds of NFC enabled devices such as smart phones, tablets, laptops, ultrabooks, portable speakers or headsets to the markets, GSMA and NXP have created the basis to jointly support the development of secure and convenient NFC applications desired by end users,” said Steve Owen, senior VP global sales, Identification business unit with NXP.

NFC is a market-proven, standardized technology co-invented by NXP and Sony in 2002. NXP is at the center of this ecosystem, fuelling its development by partnering with major handset manufacturers, mobile OS providers and applications developers.

NXP is the No. 1 supplier to the Identification market globally, and leverages its leadership in contactless and security technologies to provide complete Mobile Transactions solutions: NFC controllers, Secure Elements in all form factors, NFC tags and infrastructure reader ICs. Currently OEMs have selected NXP’s NFC technology for approximately 200 mobile devices.