Sony, NXP team for mobile payment chip venture

Hours after Qualcomm acquired [1] Firethorn Holdings for $210 million, Sony announced it too will jump on the mobile payment bandwagon, teaming with Dutch semi-conductor company NXP to create Moversa, a joint venture that will develop, produce and market a Universal Secure Access Module enabling payments and ticketing via mobile device. The Moversa chip will be available for testing by mid-2008, with commercial deployment scheduled to follow by year's end. Vienna-based Moversa will hire some 50 employees in the next few months, said NXP's Guus Frericks, who will head up the venture in collaboration with Sony's Toshio Yoshihara. Moversa "paves the way for consumers to use mobile handsets for various contactless applications such as mobile payments and transport ticketing, anytime, anywhere," the companies said in a prepared statement.

For more on Moversa:
- read this AFP article [2]

Related articles:
Study: Consumer trends favor m-banking [3] takeoff
Google files mobile payment [4] patent
British operators team for PayForIt [5]