Smart blog

One of the major announcements made at WIMA conference in Monaco last week was Nokia’s 6216 new handset commercial launch. Of course, it demonstrates a repeated commitment to the NFC technology by the undisputed #1 handset manufacturer. But, and maybe more important, it is the recognition by Nokia that the natural place for the NFC secure element is in the SIM: Nokia markets its 6216 as “the first SIM-based NFC device”. The Nokia 6216 implements the SWP protocol, an essential piece in the NFC puzzle: the SWP protocol has been standardized as the means of interface between the SIM and the NFC chip.

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This week, SIMposium, the yearly SIMalliance conference is taking place in Vienna, Austria. During SIMposium, the industry association announces its shipment figures, establishes its core subjects for the year to come, and unites all stakeholders in the industry, not only the SIM manufacturers, but also mobile network operators, all software developers, and more globally everyone involved in the SIM ecosystem.

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There is still a lot to do in terms of eco-friendliness of our industry, or of related industries.

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Major payment operators such as MasterCard and First Data are jumping onto the sticker form factor. Both of them are introducing stickers as one of the form factors they support for contactless payment: they both announced the commercialization of contactless chip based stickers, with Inside Contactless for First Data, and with Blaze Mobile for MasterCard. The idea behind the sticker form factor is to encourage users to affix the sticker on the back of their mobile phone, in order to drive the use of the handset as a payment means.

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A recent study about cybercrime shows that cybercriminals are professionally organized and pursue high income objectives. The study, published by Finjian, a global provider of secure web gateway solutions for the enterprise market, includes a research about one of the rogueware affiliate networks, where members make US$ 10,800 (EUR 8,100) a day. This rogueware or malware is distributed through internet searches where victims are directed to infection websites when they misspell common research keywords such as “obbama” or “liscense”. In this example, 1.8 million unique users were redirected to the rogue Anti-Virus software during 16 consecutive days. Members of the affiliate network were rewarded for each successful redirection with US$ 0.096 (EUR 0.072) “a piece”, which totals US$ 172,800 (EUR 130,000) or US$ 10,800 (EUR 8,100) per day.

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