Hello from Sunny Singapore!
Just to add to the bit about the use of Felica overseas. Felica is used
in Singapore for travel - it works on both the trains and buses. It's a
simple tap & go - not unlike the Suica, and is called the EZ-Link Card.
Increasingly, there are applications for paying for other things. Most
Mac Donald's outlets, some 7-eleven stores and even a few movie theatres
accept payments using your EZ-Link Card. I had also read on article
that they were going to use it in primary and secondary schools for
letting the kids make payments in canteens - rather than use cash.
For most part, the EZ-Link Card is only a "cash-card" though Mac
Donalds' loyalty scheme is also based on the Felica - I don't know if
they do any storage on the card, or if they use the Card ID as an index
into a database. But, it is used for that, too.
I believe one of the major problems with Felica is the cost of the card,
though.
Cheers
mohit.
Benjamin Joffe wrote:
>To answer about the name of the company and give a couple of additional
>details:
>
>The company doing the licensing of technology is called Felica Networks.
>Its shareholders are Sony (57%), DoCoMo (57%) and JR East (5%).
>
>Edy is an application running on the Felica technology, just like Suica.
>Edy is managed by the Bitwallet consortium (Sony 34.55%, NTT DoCoMo 15.88%,
>and about 40 others among which banks, KDDI, Toyota, karaoke, video
>games companies)
>Suica is owned by JR East, and has been extended partly to other JR
>regional companies.
>
>Edy is mainly a mobile payment solution while Suica's main function is
>contactless card for
>transportation. However, both allow mobile payment and Suica is
>increasingly competing with
>Edy, thus having two applications of the same technology fighting to
>convince store chains and
>businesses to chose their system. In the convenience stores world, AM/PM
>has been a long-time
>user of Edy, and is now joined by Sunkus/Circle K, while Family Mart has
>decided to get
>a Suica reader-writer in 1000 stores for a start...
>
>
* snip *
Received on Mon Feb 28 03:52:49 2005