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Home ? Cell Phone News ? Narrate Zoosh Introduces Ultrasonic NFC for iPhone, Android

While Google prepares to get its Google Wallet mobile
payment service based on traditional near field communications technology
into New York and San Francisco markets this summer, a startup is taking a
different tack with NFC: ultrasonics.

NFC is a wireless technology that enables short-range
communications between devices, such as smartphones and a point-of-sale
(POS) terminal, equipped with special sensors. Google, the ISIS carrier mobile
payment initiative, and many others are using NFC in this fashion.?

Narrate?s Zoosh software leverages smartphones? speakers and microphones to
enable the same data communications between devices that today?s NFC provides, but with
ultrasonics frequencies that are inaudible to humans.

Narrate Co-founder and Chief Development Officer
Byron Alsberg said Zoosh uses the phone speaker as a data transmitter
to transmit inaudible data over the air to a device?s microphone as the
data receiver. Zoosh transmission are encrypted with a unique
electronic key.

It?s ostensibly an software-based acoustic baseband, with
proprietary algorithms rolled up in software to power applications. ?If
a device has MP3 playback capability, it can Zoosh,? Alsberg told eWEEK.

In nature, ultrasonics are used by frogs, dolphins and other animals
to communicate; with Zoosh, they are being used to enable secure communications in
Apple?s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhones, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android phones, iPads and
Android tablets, as well as computers, TVs and feature phones.

This is a potentially big deal because today?s
NFC-enabled smartphones require special NFC chips. Zoosh effectively cuts
out that chip as middleman.

Google for example provides NFC capabilities in its
Android 2.3 ?Gingerbread? operating system. However, Gingerbread
smartphones such as the Samsung Nexus S 4G leverage Secure Element chip to
enable NFC and store credit card information for the Google Wallet service.

Many Android phones will be upgraded to Gingerbread this
year, but most won?t be able to enjoy the benefits of NFC because they lack those
chips. Zoosh will in fact enable these communications, cutting out that chip
and even the network connection as middlemen, Narrate CEO and Co-founder Brett
Paulson told eWEEK.

?When we look at the current technologies out there,
they have fallen short in trying to provide this device-to-device technology,?
Paulson said.

Indeed, Google and its carrier partners could well license (or buy)
Zoosh to enable mobile transactions for Gingerbread smartphones lacking
NFC chips. See how Zoosh works in this demo, which shows payment between an Android smartphone and and iPhone.

Paulson said he, Alsberg and their team are selling Zoosh in a software development kit developers
can plug into their existing applications.

This kit is sold directly to wireless carriers, which may provision
it to thousands of devices over
the air. At the retail level, most POS systems already have audio
systems in them, so retailers could install Zoosh and plug in a $30
dock that conducts NFC transactions.

Loyalty card provider SparkBase will use Zoosh to store and manage loyalty cards via smartphones in July. Other use cases for Zoosh include purchasing train
tickets, goods from vending machines, virtual currencies and checking in at the local gym. Bluetooth
headset pairing is in the works as well.

Naratte, which banked $5 million in funding from unnamed
investors, is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. and has 12 employees. The company
currently has eight patents pending.

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Article source: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Narrate-Zoosh-Introduces-Ultrasonic-NFC-for-iPhone-Android-807492/

Source: http://thephonenerd.com/2011/06/20/narrate-zoosh-introduces-ultrasonic-nfc-for-iphone-android/

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