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DoCoMo Starts Cell Phone Smart Card Trial

Posted by michael on from the swipe-and-run dept.

virtualXTC writes "The Japanese phone company NTT DoCoMo and electronics giant Sony will begin a trial of cell phones with embedded smart cards with speed pass-like capabilities that will allow the user to purchase anything from travel passes to movie tickets just by placing their cell phone near an electronic reader. Potentially the smart card 'can serve as an ID card, travel pass, or login for a corporate computer network, all at the same time'. If they'd just attach a money clip to it, I could get rid of my wallet entirely."

3 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Just a few concerns I have by pbox · · Score: 3, Informative

    Taking into account the fact that Japan is possibly the last of the developed countries where you can use your ATM card ONLY at your bank's machine, it is more han likely that DoCoMo's smartcard would only work at DoCoMo's POS terminals, plus other places which have (possibly exclusive) business relationship (ie. clients) with DoCoMo.

    Let's wait for ISO, ASA, or some standarization body, this won't cut it.

    BTW, in Finland and most of Western Europe, (and in Japan too) you can pay for your snack purchases by you phone (no need for the smartcard), so what is exactly news about this??

    --
    Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
  2. Re:Me, I'm keeping my wallet by RazzleFrog · · Score: 3, Informative

    Bank robbers are not caught using serial numbers. They are convicted with serial numbers. When I was a teller (many years ago now so it may have changed) they used to have a stack of 100's that we kept logged in our drawer. If we were robbed the log of numbers went to the cops to aid in conviction. There are far too many places to pass off bills for it to be an effective way to actually catch anybody.

  3. Inaccuracies about smartcards by fuzheado · · Score: 3, Informative
    Lots of the discussion here are addressing things already solved. Here in Hong Kong, the Octopus system is the largest deployment of contactless FeliCa cards in the world -- 10 million issued, 8 million transactions a day.
    1. Contactless smart cards are DIFFERENT than Speedpass RFID systems. Speedpass is a cookie - it does nothing other than provide a unique key for some other database to look up information. FeliCa has stored value and can be read from/written to. So the Slashdot intro stating "speed pass-like capabilities," is inaccurate.

    2. It is anonymous already. Vast majority of users use cash to top up, no personal info, not linked to bank accounts, nothing. Add value to the card at 7-11 stores (open 24 hours) or subway stations.

    3. E-theft is not a problem. You cannot steal money by passing handheld readers over peoples' back pockets. Card readers are not readily available and there is an encryption system to them even if you could get your hands on a vanilla reader. Also, the key to Octopus/FeliCa is a nightly settlement system, of which you must be an approved vendor. This requires contacting the central system and authenticating. Can't be done by a plain Joe.

    4. Been there, done that. We had FeliCa-in-cell-phone pilot last year, with a Nokia 3300 series phone with a FeliCa chip embedded. Cute, but no real practical application. People change cell phones here like shoes, so why tie your e-cash to a phone?