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Smart Insights Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the smart card industry, its businesses, its technologies, and of course, its markets as well as its technology suppliers. Smart Insights covers all the major trends in the industry, it encompasses worldwide business, public and private standardization bodies, industry analysts and also the people belonging to the Smart Card Industry community.

Smart Insights Reports cover the smart card or secure transaction industry. They are industry reports covering a technology, a geographical area or a major issue in the industry. Smart Insights Reports include qualitative and quantitative analysis. They are built on a combination of primary research and secondary research, supported by an intimate knowledge thanks to years of experience in the smart card industry.

Smart Insights publications are brought to you by Thierry Spanjaard who has more than 20 years experience in the industry, in a variety of positions.

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Visa Europe’s new digital wallet service, V.me by Visa, will launch to an initial group of consumers in the UK, Spain and France in autumn 2012. The service will be made available through Visa’s member banks and will initially be accessed through the internet browser on a PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Consumers will be able to put multiple Visa and non-Visa cards into the wallet. For retailers, it offers the opportunity to streamline the customer checkout process, driving up conversion rates and shopper satisfaction.

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The worldwide mobile phone market declined 1.5% YoY in Q1/2012, as Samsung ousted longtime leader Nokia to become the world’s top mobile phone vendor. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped 398.4 million units, compared to 404.3 million units in Q1/2011.

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Eurosmart, the secure transactions industry association has just published its market data for 2011 and its forecast for 2012:

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Roland Moreno, born 11 June 1945, died on 29 April 2012. According to The Guardian, he once boasted that he could stop anyone on the streets of Paris and they would be carrying at least three examples of the smart card he invented, such as bank cards, shopping cards and phone payment cards. Now, with the expansion of the secure transactions industry, and to the volume of SIM cards, his invention has touched almost everyone on the planet.

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Less than one year after raising US$ 100 million (EUR 76 million), which valued Square at US$ 1.6 billion (EUR 1.2 billion), the company is going back to its investors. It is now seeking to raise as much as US$ 250 million (EUR 190 million) at a US$ 3 billion (EUR 2.3 billion) to US$ 4 billion (EUR 3.0 billion) valuation, said people briefed on the matter.

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eBay announced Q1/2012 financial results. Revenue increased by 29% year-on-year to US$ 3.3 billion (EUR 2.51 billion), ahead of Wall Street’s anticipated US$ 3.15 billion (EUR 2.39 billion). PayPal revenues increased 32% to US$ 1.3 billion (EUR 1 billion), while Ebay’s core marketplaces business, where people buy and sell items online, showed more modest growth, with revenues increasing 11% to US$ 1.7 billion (EUR 1.3 billion). PayPal’s net total payment volume (TPV) grew 24% YoY to US$ 34 billion (EUR 26 billion).

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Nokia just launched the NFC version of the recently-launched Nokia Lumia 610, an affordable smartphone in the Lumia range, positioned by the company as an introduction to Microsoft Windows Phone for a younger audience. Orange will be the first operator to range the Lumia 610 NFC, which can pair with NFC accessories and read NFC tags. The Lumia 610 NFC also has the hardware and software enablers for the implementation of NFC payment and ticketing solutions, and has been certified for contactless payments both with MasterCard PayPass technology, and with Visa's mobile application for payments at the point of sale, Visa payWave.

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StarChip, a company designing and qualifying Smart Card ICs announced the development of the ARX CPU, a 32-bit RISC Secure Core based on Cortus’ APS3s CPU. This announcement takes part in StarChip’s strategic commitment to the smart card business by extending its product portfolio to payment and ID markets.

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UL, the Underwriter Laboratories, announced the acquisition of Collis, a major provider of secure transaction technology and advisory services based in Leiden, Netherlands. UL says this addition positions the company as the world's first global provider of end-to-end transaction security, interoperability and conformance evaluation and advisory services for the mobile, payment card, eTicketing and ID management sectors.

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Nokia continues to fight against Apple in the struggle to define standard for nano-SIM cards (cf. Smart Insights Weekly #12-13), saying it will refuse to license its SIM patents if telecoms body ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) approves Apple’s alternative tiny design, upping the stakes in the battle for the next-generation itty-bitty SIM, reports The Register. Nokia argues that Apple does not own the patents to back up its proposal.

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