quickpass
Latest
China UnionPay and Intel join forces for secure mobile payment
At IDF's second-day keynote in Beijing today, Intel announced its collaboration with bank card giant China UnionPay for secure mobile payment, with the latter utilizing Intel's Identity Protection Technology and also its distribution of the Hadoop software framework for datacenters. With UnionPay being China's top bank card organization boasting a total of 3.5 billion cards to date, this is obviously a big deal for Intel both locally and around the world -- at least in the 141 countries and regions where UnionPay is accepted, according to Executive Vice President Chai Hongfeng. Chai also used his stage time to show off UnionPay Quick Pass, China's very own NFC payment service with over 1.1 million local POS terminals as of December 2012. The exec used none other than Intel's developer device to buy its Corporate Vice President Doug Fisher a can of "Mountain Doug" (we would've preferred "Chai Tea" instead), but of course, HTC beat Intel to it with the joint launch of mobile Quick Pass back in August 2011. Anyhow, there's a press release after the break.
HTC and China's UnionPay ink deal for NFC-enabled mobile payment system, new handset
Fun news for the swipe-to-pay set: HTC has signed on to produce an NFC-enabled phone -- this would be its first -- in China this September. The deal will see China's UnionPay Co. start accepting mobile payments using this HTC device through its 400,000-strong network of POS terminals. A UnionPay rep. on-hand suggested that that number will likely expand to 700,000 by year's end, and good thing too if you consider the country has some 2.6 billion credit and debit cards in circulation worldwide. Unfortunately, there was little mention of HTC's new device, though the pictures seem to suggest that the current prototype used in the demo was a revved up version of its Incredible S smartphone -- tentatively referred to as the HTC "Stunning." The jury's still out on the this whole mobile payment thing, but we're firm believers that if it is safe and convenient, everybody's gonna buy in.
