Soon, your mobile will start the car for you!

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Come 2011 and mobile phone will be play an additional role as car key using NFC (near field communication) technology. NXP is working on a prototype key of this project and is in talks with a few car manufacturers to role out this technology.

"We have demonstrated this technology to a few car manufacturers. There is a possibility to see the roll out of this technology by 2011," said Ashok Kumar Chandak, senior director, NXP Semiconductors India.

Though Chandak did not name the car companies, he mentioned it is the car manufacturers in Germany who have shown interest in adapting this system.

To start a car using mobile phone as key, a user will have to bring mobile phone within 10 centimeters close to a unit, which will be placed on the steering wheel.

"Already people are using a unit for immobilizer purpose. We will use the same space and make it an interface for mobile phones to be used as car key. We have to change this unit and make it NFC compatible," explained Chandak.

In the coming days embedding NFC in mobile phone will be an unavoidable trend. Nokia has already launched NFC powered phones and some of the other mobile phone players have also demonstrated NFC enabled phones.

NFC, in coming days, is expected to facilitate many commercial activities like credit card payment, ticketing and billing.

In the end of June, Citibank launched a pilot project for user of Vodafone using Nokia 6212 that will enable mobile phone to double as credit card using NFC technology.

The State Bank of India in Mizoram is running a pilot project in the state, where without setting up branch in a rural part of the state it is running its small-scale banking operation using NFC technology embedded in mobile phones.

“SBI has appointed its executive in village and provided people there with smart card. People deposit their money to this bank executive who feed detail in the mobile phone,” explained Chandak

“But to start the process the customer has to use his smart card and bring it close to NFC enabled mobile phone which reads detail and allows the bank executive to operate the system. He prints out the detail of the transaction and hands over the receipt to the SBI customer. Biometric thumb impression of the customer is taken in between to support the process,” he said.

The whole banking process of SBI requires only four modules viz, NFC enabled phone, finger print authentication device, contact less smart card for customer and NFC enabled receipt printer.

So the tiny gadget is getting essentially closer and closer to our life, isn't it?