Saturday, October 10, 2009

RFID could be in all cell phones by 2010

All cell phones will come packed with an RFID chip by next summer . According to Ericsson's vice-president of systems architecture, Håkan Djuphammar: "A year from now, basically every new phone sold will have [near field communication]. It's a two-way, bio-directional RFID communication link that makes this device work as a tag or reader."
Djuphammar said devices with RFID chips will have a secure environment on the SIM card. This will enable phones to take on other roles, such as the keys for your car or house, or a credit card or concert ticket. Using RFID in this way could enable a mobile to be assigned to open a door for a certain period of time only, meaning the company could better manage access to its facilities, while also replacing the hassle of dealing with thousands of physical keys.
Mobile phones could also become instruments of fraud detection. Djuphammar said credit card companies could make use of mobile user location data and IP mapping to ascertain whether a transaction is taking place in the vicinity of the official card holder, thereby judging whether the transaction is likely to be genuine or not. (Safe from Chinese hackers!)
Finally, according to the Ericsson chief, location data of phones could be leveraged to create real-time road traffic maps generated by analysing the speed of the mobile phone base station hand-off to ascertain how fast cars are travelling. This data could then be sold to GPS device companies, enabling them to provide dynamic travel information to motorists. "That is a typical win-win, situation” he enthused. http://news.zdnet.com/
Meanwhile, in the UK, there is now a directory of mobile phone users. Connectivity, the company that’s offering the services, bought the records from brokers and now has on its starting database about 16 million names (~ 40% of UK’s regular phones).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i wondered why they were giving away expensive phones on contract !!