A mobile-commerce company in Berkeley, Calif., says it has devised a means to enable mobile phones to communicate with chips in attached stickers to support true Near Field Communication payments and two-way communications between NFC chips.
Blaze Mobile Inc. says its new patent-pending “smart” contactless sticker can both send and receive payment information and can communicate directly and immediately with phones without the need of a carrier network or Wi-Fi connection.
Michelle Fisher, the company’s CEO, declined to say how the sticker’s chip communicates with Blaze’s Blaze Wallet application, which can run on most smart phones, including Apple Inc. iPhones and Research in Motion Ltd. BlackBerry devices. “It’s like Coca Cola’s recipe–it’s a trade secret,” she tells PaymentsSource.
Blaze Mobile has set up a website where consumers may order the stickers for free. Once the sticker is available during the first quarter of 2011, consumers may use it in connection with the wallet to store and select from multiple payment options, including credit, debit and prepaid cards, according to Blaze Mobile, which says its sticker also is usable for building, car and health care data access.
With the Blaze Wallet, when the user picks the type of payment to use on the screen, it would let the chip in the sticker know that is the type of contactless payment to initiate, Fisher says. The chip then would send the completed transaction details back to the app for sorting and recordkeeping.
Users also could use the stickers to communicate with other NFC chips, such as ones possibly embedded in posters to access movie trailers, Fisher says. And they could deactivate lost or stolen stickers remotely from Blaze’s website or by calling a toll-free company number.
Blaze Mobile in 2006 developed its initial contactless sticker to address the lack of NFC phones. The original sticker sends data only to terminals that can read the contactless transmissions, and the purchase details traverse to Blaze’s servers using the company’s ties to financial institutions’ online-banking services. Blaze then delivers the digital receipt to the mobile device over the air using the carrier network.
The original sticker supports only Blaze’s cobranded MasterCard prepaid card. With the new sticker, consumers may choose any issuers’ cards to access with the chip and to include in the mobile wallet.
Blaze earns its revenue from its original sticker by receiving a share of the transaction interchange earned by its undisclosed issuing partner and from the advertising its sells for its wallet app, Fisher says. The revenue model will differ a bit for the new sticker, she says.
The new sticker, which Blaze also says is an interim step until phones with embedded NFC chips become widely available, eliminates potential problems that can arise when the wireless network is not available to transfer the data to the phone by instead communicating the transaction details directly from the sticker’s chip to the phone app, Fisher says.
George Peabody, director of the emerging technologies advisory service at Mercator Advisory Group of Boston, says despite the ability for Blaze Mobile’ sticker to communicate with its smart phone application, the company is wise to consider the sticker an interim step to NFC payments.
“The concern I have is it’s not a standard approach, and we’re trying to get a standard method for NFC all over the world,” he says. “And [NFC is] going to be something that connects directly to the smart phone motherboard.”
Peabody believes the ultimate NFC phone will have direct inclusion of an NFC chip, or it is possible that subsequent versions of microSD chips that Visa Inc. and some issuers are supporting that consumers insert into their phones will support two-way NFC communications. In any case, as companies roll out NFC capabilities, they should be clear what they are building and trying to accomplish with the technology, he says.
“Now is the time issuers and merchants want to be looking at how do I use NFC, and for that decision to be made you need a robust ecosystem around it, which includes clarity,” Peabody says.
Blaze Mobile has not said publicly how many contactless stickers it has distributed since it launched the initial version. However, it might provide a total once the new sticker rolls out, Fisher says, noting Blaze Mobile also may announce early next year reseller agreements involving various organizations.
MasterCard Worldwide announced in March 2009 it was offering Blaze’s original sticker in conjunction with the Blaze Mobile Wallet application. The wallet can access accounts at more than 8,000 financial institutions that offer online access, including Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. (
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