The goal of this initiative, which was launched in mid-September by Industry Minister, Christian Estrosi, and is being backed strongly by the government, is to stimulate the emergence of innovative new services across a wide range of areas that affect out daily life. These include transport, urban life, health, museums, security, personal services, agri-food, as well as a huge number of other areas. NFC technologies will enable mobile phone users to use their cellphones to access a host of services, such as transit cards, electronic loyalty cards and contactless entry badges. And RFID electronic tickets are also about to revolutionize companies’ internal business processes in terms of logistics, product traceability and production.

A total of 38 projects were lodged in Spring 2009 following the national Call for IPER-SMSC Projects employing “innovative RFID and contactless mobile services uses”. And four of the 13 selected projects were developed within the world class SCS competitive cluster, which is headquartered in Sophia Antipolis, underlining the major role that this cluster plays in developing contactless technologies. For SCS Managing Director, Georges Falessi, “This result underlines the effectiveness of our strategy, which is focused on mobility and traceability, and underlines the PACA region’s strength in the contactless technologies sector.”

The 4 projects, which highlight the strong local synergy, are the result of partnerships between 7 SMEs, 3 laboratories, 7 major groups and 1 association.

They are:

- Veolia BPass+: the Nice Côte-d'Azur public transport company will offer users a service to renew and store their transport tickets on the mobile NFC phones;

- Nice Future Campus: a project to set-up a large experiment on contactless mobile services with students at the Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis campus ; an initiative that will involve a large partnership focused around Extelia ;

- Smart Muse, sponsored by Connecthings, this project will enable museums to install intelligent interfaces for museum visits (trials will be carried out at the Centre Pompidou and in the old quarter of Nice) using RFID tags to enable visitors to access contextualized content;

- Matrice : byApologic, focusing on a mobile home-help payment system (Chèques Emploi Service Universels (CESU)) to replace paper checks, based on badges communicating with mobile devices to log in hours and make payments.

The 9 other projects selected are: Mobemo, NFC SCM, Must, Altess, NFC 2UI, STAM-RFID, La Vitrine Intelligente, Digiprice and IDviandes.