The highly anticipated Mobile World Congress has come to an end. Besides hosting Mark Zuckerberg as a guest speaker, the event also marked 2016 as the year with interesting announcements and new partnerships.
Let´s start with the announcement between MasterCard and WISeKey. These two companies have partnered to enable contactless payments on select luxury brand watches and other forms of wearables. The partnership adds new devices and brands to ongoing MasterCard programs to bring payments to any consumer gadget, accessory or wearable devices.
Coin announced a developer program for accelerating the integration of payments into wearables. The program will enable access to the MasterCard Digital Enablement Service (MDES) to securely digitize MasterCard payment credentials and further reduce the entry barrier for device manufacturers. For more information please read here.
Another payment announcement was made by Visa Inc. The company announced that it is expanding its Visa Ready program to include companies within the Internet of Things (IoT), such as manufacturers of wearables, automobiles, appliances and much more. It is said that their partners include Accenture, Coin, Giesecke & Devrient, Fit Pay, and Samsung. For finding out more details about their project please read the following article.
Singer Will.I.am made another attempt to take over the wearable industry by launching a device called Dial. You can send emails and texts, plays music and track your fitness. Interesting thing about this product is that unlike Apple watch or Samsung Gear watch – this device is not synced to a phone.
Last but not least, LG launched the LG 360 VR. These virtual glasses are compatible with LG’s newest G5 phone. You just plug them into the phone’s USB-C jack and off you go adventuring in a new VR world.
It is always inspiring to see collaboration among big tech giants bring forth game changing devices. We can’t wait to see what year 2016 has a store for us.
