Soon digital security firm Gemalto’s new MasterCard PayPass SIM card will make NFC payments possible on all GSM phones—whether smart or dumb. It means that you’ll be able to use the SIM to manage and make mobile payments and—if it’s successful—the SIM could bring the first mass commercial rollout of NFC payments across the world. And this is awesome, because it means we’re another step closer to a wallet-less future. [Gemalto via Engadget]
Gemalto, with Facebook’s help, just made a text-based, on-SIM implementation of basic Facebook functions. The software lets dumbphones do simple Facebook tasks like changing status or posting on walls. Good for developing countries, weird for everywhere else. [The Register]
Now the credit-card sized plastic thing that mobile phone SIM units are shipped in can carry the mobile’s associated data files, thanks to Gemalto’s DVD-SIM “Smart Video Card.” In the name of convergence (and possibly environmental friendliness) the company is making the cards for the Italian operator Wind, where the DVD segment has drivers for PCs to allow wireless internet access. The data segment will fit up to 50MB, and it’s clearly better than having a blank bit of plastic (which you normally bin anyway) and an additional CD. But I can see two problems: snapping off the SIM portion of the device is bound to leave you with little plasticky bits that unbalance the DVD part when you put it in a drive, and it’s only going to work on tray-loading drives. Convergence gone mad. [Intomobile]
