BART riders took part in a trial held in San Francisco's BART
used their contactless, Near Field Communication (NFC) enabled phones to
pay for their BART fares and meals at participating Jack in the Box
restaurants. The trial is deemed a success.
The results of the test from Jan. 28 to May 30, 2008 show that participants at BART stations
frequently tapped smart advertisements in BART stations with their NFC
phones. These posters contained directions to nearby Jack in the Box
restaurants.
trial, participants tapped their phones several hundred times on NFC-enabled smart
posters located throughout the BART terminal to obtain directions to the
nearest Jack in the Box restaurant from the BART station.
payment is a killer application for NFC mobile phones providing
convenience and speed to customers who take transit and other public
transportation frequently," said Michael
Mullagh, ViVOtech CEO. "We are also
encouraged to see that merchant card payments and opt-in smart poster
applications enabled by ViVOtech software through the same NFC mobile
phone were also highly used by the trial participants."
The data shows that trial participants took close to 9,000 trips on BART
during the trial. To pay at BART stations, they simply tapped their
NFC-equipped mobile phones, provided by Sprint, on top of the BART fare
gates.
This represents an average of 50 trips per participant during the
four-month trial. Participants also topped-up their BART card balances
more than 800 times using the over-the-air (OTA) feature of their
NFC-equipped phones averaging five BART top-ups per mobile phone during
the trial. More than 80% of trial participants indicated that the mobile
wallet application was easy to use.
ViVOtech developed the wallet software for the NFC mobile phones and the
OTA card provisioning servers that Sprint used for the trial. This
enabled participants to remotely download their BART fare and Jack Ca$h(TM)
gift cards onto their mobile phones, check their card balances, review
previous transactions, automatically top up their cards and use their
phones to pay for BART fares and Jack in the Box food. ViVOtech also
provided the contactless payment devices that read the NFC-enabled chips
at Jack in the Box restaurants