Author: Lucy

Mass transit users in Romania will be able to use their smartphones to pay for their passage.

The Bucharest mass transit system in Romania has just announced that, starting this month, it will make it possible for NFC technology enabled smartphones to be used in order to use mobile payments for purchasing travel fare.

This is meant to appeal to the rapidly growing number of smartphone using commuters in the city.

The Bucharest mobile payments announcement came from the system’s operator, Metrorex. The reason that NFC technology enabled smartphone systems will be implemented throughout the service following a successful trial period at seven different stations in the city. The company determined that the popularity of the transactions merited an expansion of the program throughout every station in the city.

Certain wireless service subscribers will have access to the NFC technology and text mobile payments for fares.

Though this may expand in the future, at the moment, Orange and Vodafone wireless carrier subscribers will be able to text a message to a special number that places the fare charge on the smartphone user’s account. That customer is then texted a message as confirmation.

This comes at a time that a service in India’s city of Chennai has also announced that it will be using NFC technology when it opens its rail system in 2015. That system will not be using the text method like the one in Bucharest.

By using the text based mobile payments services, it means that the transactions won’t be available only to individuals who have NFC technology embedded in their devices. This is important as the tech is only currently available in a small percentage of devices. Text opens up the opportunity to the majority of device carriers. This metro service currently has a network of 51 different stations throughout Bucharest.

Every year, the system transports over 170 million passengers, according to the statistics provided by Metrorex. During the pilot for this fare transaction program, there were over 10,000 validations that were reliably and successfully processed. The data regarding the number of expected users for this year or regarding NFC technology transactions has not yet been released.

The UTV Stars application will apply AR for enhancing the user experience in a high tech way.

Disney UTV Digital has just announced the release of its UTV Stars application for both Apple iOS and Google Android based devices, and that it will feature an augmented reality search option.

This new app has a strong entertainment focus and provides a broad range of different content, says Disney UTV.

The company has revealed that the new application includes content such as live TV streaming, movies, gossip, and Bollywood news. However, the tech and mobile commerce news headlines are being made as a result of the augmented reality feature which allows smartphone and tablet users to snap a movie poster picture from any medium – from print to screen, etc – and gain access to a considerable amount of information about that film.

The augmented reality search feature provides access to everything from text to video and social media.

When the device user applies the augmented reality search feature to a poster, he or she can learn more about the movie through behind the scenes videos, movie trailers, images, Tweets, and other forms of relevant content.

The augmented reality feature itself is called Snap Search. It is powered by Ocutag Technology by Ricoh Innovations. The app is designed to provide a great deal of information, including the very latest in a section that it has labeled “Just In”. This is made up of celebrity tweets from a number of different participants. There is also a “spotted” feed which provides both gossip and news from UTV Stars, including videos from that channel as well as pictures from paparazzi.

The augmented reality feature isn’t the only mobile commerce element to the app, as it also focuses on marketing via social media. It allows its users to share the updates that it sees by way of their own social network accounts at Twitter and Facebook, as well as through email. Moreover, they can save images as favorites so that they can be easily seen later in their personal lists. Should this app become popular, the social element could potentially help it to spread much more quickly and gain more users.