Technology is rocketing to the stars at warp speed and Netcom is not taking a back seat. A new card crafted by them is able to take over payments using a smartphone.
Some say you cannot have your cake and eat it too. Netcom does not believe that. They have created a MicroSD card with 8 gigabytes of room for videos, music and more while also filling the card with antennas. The antennas will allow the card to work as part of a contactless payment system. The name of this is “NFC” or “Near Field Communication”. It is currently a wave taking over the minds of those who are manufacturing smartphones. If put into place it will allow the chip to handle payments much like banks do now.
The idea is simple. Just put the chip into a MicroSD slot on the smartphone and download the supporting software. The software is a custom Java program that should be compatible with any phone that has Java installed. In the near future, Netcom has an android app that will also serve smartphones. When the user wants to pay for something the NFC chip in the flash memory card will communicate with another machine, an external reader. The NFC chip in the phone will need to be brought within a very close distance to the reader. Then, the reader reads the payment information from the phone and charges the customer. A receipt is printed from the reader for the customer and the transaction is accomplished.
What this does is free up those people who wanted to use NFC. They do not have to spend money on a new smartphone or feature phone. All they need is the NFC card and to make sure Java is installed on their phone. The bad news is that this special “NFC on a flash card” is not going to be ready until the end of the year. The Netcom company claims it will take three to six months to get everything ready. They are working with one phone manufacturer at the moment to bring this to market.
Netcom is a Chinese company that also operates as an ISP in China. They are popular for more than just the “NFC on a card” idea. They are a mainland provider of wired telecommunications services. They are popular for rerouting Google, Yahoo and Bing searches to the Chinese search engine Baidu. There is no word yet on the price of the Netcom NFC flash card.
