This article is more than 1 year old
Apple fanbois to be empowered to bonk each other
But we were doing that FIVE YEARS AGO, says exasperated PayPal
Apple has filed a patent which uses NFC and Bluetooth to transfer funds when you bonk two iPhones together.
The technology doesn’t use the NFC radio to transfer the funds: it’s done either over the air or by Bluetooth. The NFC is used to establish the veracity of the two ends and to encrypt the data using the secure element.
That may be implemented in the new, unannounced NXP VP2 chip, which 9to5mac has shown in a teardown of the forthcoming iPhone 6S.
Free bonking is great ... isn't it?
Watching Apple try to cut banks out of the loop is interesting, and if ever there was an industry which was ripe for reform it is banking.
If the idea of tapping two phones together to transfer money seems a little familiar, it may be because “bumping” was something PayPal announced five years ago. That, of course, has been a huge success and is used all the time. Cough cough.
The more traditional form of NFC – bonking your mobile – will come to the UK in the form of Apple Pay. This is believed to be set for a 14 July launch, after a leaked Waitrose memo warned staff to prepare for the Bastille Day debut.
It will be a challenge for the combination of the mobile and banking industries. Mobile payments are on the rise, thanks to the rise of internet shopping and the move to mobile devices. Contactless payments are also on the rise, with 1.1bn contactless transactions made by Visa cardholders across Europe in the last 12 months.
But while Visa is happy to bombard us with figures about how much money (€12.6bn) and how many contactless cards and NFC phones (130m) there are in Europe, the company stared at its corporate shoes and mumbled when The Reg asked how many of those 1.1bn transactions were mobile.
We can be sure it’s less than 12m, because in February Jeremy Nicholds told us that he aspired to a million transactions a month. If we’d hit that lofty target it would be 0.01 per cent of transactions, a figure very similar to that given by TfL for the first million EMV (credit card as opposed to Oyster) contactless journeys on the tube.
But perhaps the numbers and failure of bumping means nothing and iPhone users really do just want to bonk. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
