PayPal announces phone-to-phone NFC support, cuts eyes at Google (video)

Still eager to do business with a company that’ll lock your account on a whim and side with the buyer regardless of the facts? Splendid! If that’s you, PayPal would love for you to know that it has announced a new phone-to-phone NFC payment application at MobileBeat 2011, offering Nexus S owners the ability to request and transfer funds between handsets. As of now, the functionality is quite limited — there’s just a single smartphone with the hardware capabilities to take advantage, and there’s no phone-to-anything not a phone supported as of now. In other words, this isn’t exactly a Square killer just yet, but it’s definitely something for the sued folks at Google to pay attention to. We’re also hearing that P2P transactions through PayPal are gratis “if using a bank account or existing balance in the customer’s PayPal account,” but no one’s coughing up details on what’ll be deducted in the form of fees when using a different method of payment. A video demo of the 48 second transaction awaits you after the break, but sadly, there’s no details on how soon it’ll be made available to the public.

 

Samsung and Visa join forces to enable NFC mobile payment at 2012 Olympics

From a gadgeteer’s point of view, one of the best things about the Olympics is its tendency to bring in new technologies to the hosting city. Take the 2012 games, for example: not only are the London Underground stations getting WiFi hotspots, but news has it that Samsung and Visa are holding hands to deliver NFC mobile payment solutions to the city. In fact, more than 60,000 locations in London are already geared up with contactless payment systems, and right now Visa is negotiating with banks to get its contactless cards and mobile phones approved. For the latter, one such device will be Samsung’s Olympic and Paralympic Games mobile handset that comes with a Visa-enabled SIM card, and it’ll be made available to sponsored athletes as well as various retailers. Furthermore, this alliance will continue after the Olympics, and Visa is rolling out its mobile payment system in many other countries as we speak, so it shouldn’t be long before we hear more Visa handset announcements.