A Californian tech upstart called Naratte is using soundwaves instead of NFC chips to perform secure mobile transactions. The company has unveiled Zoosh, an app that delivers data using short-distance sound transmissions (at around 20,000Hz). It is said to work with any device loaded with a speaker and microphone. Zoosh could …

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Thursday 23rd June 2011 08:06 GMT DRendar

Sooooo....

Sooooo, it's an old fashioned Modem then, just working in the HF band with air as the transmission medium instead of rickety old BT copper cable.

Pretty sure there's going to be some prior art floating around that!

A clever idea though... good on 'em.... will be interested to see how the security implications will behandled though.

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Monday 27th June 2011 07:51 GMT imberner

Zoosh is by no means the first technology using sound to make mobile contactless transactions.

Sound Based Technologies (SBT) have been defining mobile contactless transactions in many countries while NFC has been struggling to take off. The leading SBT, Near Sound Data Transfer (NSDT™), is enabling mobile-based financial services in over 30 emerging markets including Namibia with Mobipay, Nicaragua with MPeso, Ivory Coast with Orange Money, and others. NSDT is also being used for physical access control, web authentication, and a range of other contactless mobile-transaction applications in the US and Europe.

Technologies like NSDT and Zoosh prove that contactless transactions are fortunately not exclusive to NFC devices. There are secure, fast, and simple alternatives to NFC that don’t require handset modification and, in the case of NSDT, don’t even require you to download an application or have a smart phone.

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