Visa has just rolled out a new pilot program that allows New Yorkers to pay subway, bus and train fares with a wave of their iPhones.

New York City Transit, NJ TRANSIT and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are participating in the pilot program. As part of the program, Visa is testing both payment cards and Visa payWave-enabled smartphones.

Rather than having to buy or refill a Metro card, travelers can just wave their phones in front of a contactless reader.

As we reported last month, Visa is also working with Bank of America to bring smartphone payments to retailers in New York City.

Smartphones that are equipped with a special sensor can transmit payment information to contactless card readers at fare gates. Not only does this help people get through transit stations more quickly; it also eliminates the need to buy a transit card or dig around in your purse for your existing pass.

Check out this video that Visa produced to show the smartWave wireless payment option in action:

Beyond New York, Visa is also working with LA Metro to bring TAP ReadyCARD dual-use prepaid Visa cards that act as both transit tickets and Visa debit cards.

Internationally, Visa has been deploying its payWave technology in Kuala Lampur, Singapor, Paris, Istanbul and London.

The New York subway program is only deployed across 28 stops along the Lexington subway line; but if it is successful, we might see this feature rolled out across the wider system.

Frankly, as someone who frequently loses or misplaces transit cards, having the option to just wave my smartphone to pay my fare sounds incredible. Even better than getting to use this feature for a train, using the system on the bus would make getting around much faster. Would you like to be able to pay for transit tickets by waving your phone? Let us know.

Image courtesy of Ed Yourdon
via: Mashable

Yes, OKCupid’s data confirms our suspicions, iPhone users do “do it” more, at a rate of about 2x that of Android users. Perhaps this is because the Android has an easily accessible porn app store?

Presumably iPhone users are better at getting their kicks in real life. But the chart still leaves the greatest question of our time unanswered, “Do attractive people buy more iPhones, or does the iPhone somehow make you more attractive?” In any case, maybe it’s time some of us reconsidered our gadget predilections.

Get more “facts” about the iPhone as aphrodisiac here.

Charts: OKCupid

Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. mobile-phone company, will start selling Apple Inc.’s iPhone next year, ending AT&T Inc.’s exclusive hold on the smartphone in the U.S., two people familiar with the plans said.

The device will be available to customers in January, according to the people, who declined to be named because the information isn’t public. Natalie Kerris, an Apple spokeswoman, and Jeffrey Nelson, a Verizon Wireless spokesman, declined to comment.

The iPhone, which has been the sole domain of rival AT&T in the U.S. since June 2007, will give Verizon a boost in its competition for smartphone customers, UBS AG analyst John Hodulik said in an interview. Verizon customers, who numbered 92.8 million at the end of the first quarter, may buy 3 million iPhones a quarter, he estimates.

“Apple is going to dramatically increase the number of devices it sells in the U.S. when exclusivity at AT&T ends,” said Hodulik, who is based in New York and rates Verizon shares “neutral.” “It’s hard to ignore the quality issues that AT&T has faced.”

Verizon Wireless, which is building a high-speed fourth- generation network, plans to unveil several devices that will run on the new technology in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, Chief Executive Officer Lowell McAdam has said.

IPhone Gains

Verizon Communications Inc., which co-owns the wireless company with Vodafone Group Plc, slid 9 cents to $28.62 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading at 4 p.m. AT&T fell 49 cents to $24.46. Apple, based in Cupertino, California, dropped $12.13 to $256.17 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Peter Thonis, a spokesman for Verizon Communications, andMark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, declined to comment. Tenille Kennedy, a spokeswoman for Research in Motion Ltd., didn’t return a call seeking comment.

The iPhone has helped AT&T add subscribers even as the U.S. mobile-phone market nears saturation. There are enough wireless devices for more than nine out of 10 people, according to the CTIA wireless industry association.

In the first three months of this year, about a third of AT&T’s iPhone activations came from customers who were new to the carrier. Without those 900,000 new subscribers, the company may have posted a loss in contract customers that quarter, analysts said.

Still, Dallas-based AT&T has battled customer complaints about its wireless service, especially in New York and San Francisco, and dedicated an extra $2 billion to upgrading its network this year.

BlackBerry, Android

For Apple, a partnership with Basking Ridge, New Jersey- based Verizon Wireless is a victory over rivals such as RIM and Motorola Inc., whose smartphones are currently promoted by the carrier.

“For Apple it means a larger addressable market,” said Andy Hargreaves, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon. “It’s also good news for Apple in that it will spread the load on the wireless data networks, which will be good for their customers.”

Motorola, which makes Droid phones that use Google Inc.’s Android operating system, fell 27 cents, or 3.8 percent, to $6.80 on the New York Stock Exchange. Google dropped $17.82, or 3.8 percent, to $454.26 on the Nasdaq. RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, declined $3.22, or 6.1 percent, to $49.75.

Apple has sold more than 50 million iPhones since the phone’s introduction in 2007. The latest version, iPhone 4, sold more than 1.7 million units in the first three days after its June 24 debut, a record for the product. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said the company didn’t have enough supply to meet demand. Many stores, including retailer Best Buy Co., sold out.

A release at Verizon in the first quarter will help Apple’s sales in the U.S. grow to at least 15 million units next year from 11 million in 2010, Barclays Capital analysts said in a note today. The company’s suppliers have been ramping up production of components for a phone on Verizon’s CDMA network, according to the research report.

To contact the reporter on this story: Amy Thomson in New York at athomson6@bloomberg.net

A site focused on Near Field Communications has reported that Apple has built new iPhone prototypes with hardware support for sensing RFID chips.

RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) is a technology that allows a device to sense embedded chips in nearby objects without making direct contact or without using visible light like a barcode reader. Apple has already filed patents related to a mobile “ID App” capable of using an RFID sensor, a way to use RFID to sense and connect to available WiFi networks, and a touchscreen RFID tag reader.

New RFID support in future iPhones could enable a variety of “touchless” technologies, ranging from swipe payments (where users could pay for items at a checkout, vending machine, or toll booth by swiping their phone near a payment pad), to swipe sensing of information kiosks, objects, or even animals.

Very little data needs to be transmitted between the RFID chip and the device to do useful things; a payment would only need to present the user’s account number. A kiosk could simply transmit a URL to allow users to swipe their phone to open up a web page about the local area, with transit information and maps or details on items in a museum display.

The cost of RFID chips is now down to just a few cents each in quantity, making it possible to apply them to a wide variety of uses. Shipping companies and retailers already use RFIDs to track packages much like barcodes; libraries use them to track books, farmers use them to identify animals in herds, and the army, theme parks and schools attach RFIDs to people.

RDIF in mobile applications

In Japan, QR Code barcodes have long been a popular way to obtain information about an object using a cellphone with a barcode reader or camera that can read them. Mobile phones and credit cards with RFID swipe features (like Sony’s FeliCA) have also been in use for years in Asia and Europe, and are just recently entering the US.

Apple could leverage its micropayment system in iTunes, which already has a hundred million users’ accounts with credit cards in 23 countries, to set up a payment system tied into the iPhone and iPod touch. However, simply offering a way to read RFID tags would open up the device to a variety of industrial applications where swipe sensing could be used to track inventory and discover items in the area.

Adding support for an RFID reader is apparently easy and cost effective, and can be built right into the screen according to a recent Apple patent, which stated:

“The efficient incorporation of RFID circuitry within touch sensor panel circuitry is disclosed. The RFID antenna can be placed in the touch sensor panel, such that the touch sensor panel can now additionally function as an RFID transponder. No separate space-consuming RFID antenna is necessary. Loops (single or multiple) forming the loop antenna of the RFID circuit (for either reader or tag applications) can be formed from metal on the same layer as metal traces formed in the borders of a substrate. Forming loops from metal on the same layer as the metal traces are advantageous in that the loops can be formed during the same processing step as the metal traces, without requiring a separate metal layer.”

iPhone 3.0 already supports local discovery and networking setup via Bluetooth on all iPhone models, but Bluetooth devices are too expensive to embed in lots of devices that could use cheap RFID chips.

Apple’s VP Industrial Design about the change of design and the new challenges they are faced with. First time to watch and hear details about the development of Apple’s product design. Cutout of ‘Objectified’