Contactless smart card manufacturer ASK and IDECO, its South Africa partner, announced that they have been selected by the Bombela Operating Company as one of the suppliers to the Gautrain project - a contactless ticketing system for passengers traveling between Johannesburg, Tshwane and OR Tambo International Airport.

ASK will provide the contactless smart cards of the Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) system, and IDECO will provide project support and post-personalization services.

atsec information security, a laboratory for the GSA FIPS 201 Evaluation Program which runs a product approval program for PIV-related products, has announced the successful GSA FIPS 201 evaluation of four Codebench products. Codebench is the first company with solutions evaluated for GSA product categories Caching Status Proxy, PIV Authentication System, and CHUID Authentication System.

Codebench’s PIVCheck Plus Desktop Edition with PIVCheck Certificate Manager, PIVCheck Plus Mobile Edition with PIVCheck Certificate Manager and PIVCheck Desktop Edition (both the SCVP Client and PIV Authentication System) were tested and evaluated in atsec’s Austin, Texas lab.

Juniper Research has just published a report predicting “massive growth” for mobile ticketing by 2014, according to Mobile Marketing Watch. The report states that some 15 billion mobile tickets will be in use by 2014, compared to the current mark of 2 million.

As of now, the Far East and China regions are leading the way in mobile ticketing, but Juniper predicts that Western Europe will take the lead by 2014, due to advancements in device integration.

Adelaide, Australia has announced plans to implement a smart card transit system by 2013, according to adelaidenow.com.au.

Transport Minister Patrick Conlon made the announcement today, putting the $30 million project in the hands of ATLAS, which has installed similar systems in Houston and Montreal.

The OTP Bank of Hungary has announced the country’s first rollout of MasterCard PayPass contactless cards, according to realdeal.hu.

OTP, the largest bank in Hungary, plans to issue 15,000 PayPass cards this year, with 350 points of sale available by the end of October.

Visa Europe has announced plans to spend more than $273 million on R&D for contactless payments via card and mobile device, according to nearfieldcommunicationsworld.com

The announcement was made by Marc O’Brien, Visa Europe’s head of UK and Ireland, during a visit to Dublin to market contactless cards and NFC payment to Irish banks.

Ireland’s very first contactless transaction just took place at the staff canteen at Ulster Bank’s Dublin office, ushering in a new era of contactless payment in Ireland, according to siliconrepublic.com.

Soon shops all over Ireland will be accepting Visa’s contactless payment cards for purchases of €15 or less. The cards will also come with a specific spending limit to guard against theft and fraud. Once a user clocks up more than €60 in a given day, all transactions after that will require the user to enter a PIN number.

Hypercom Corp. announced that Carrefour, a global retailer, will deploy Hypercom’s Wynid server-based payment solution and more than 12,000 PIN Pads with EMV contactless readers at 210 of its French hypermarkets, as well as at all of Carrefour’s petrol stations in France.

The multi-million dollar agreement is believed to represent one of the world’s largest deployments of EMV contactless readers and represents an expansion to Hypercom’s existing business with Carrefour. The giant retailer already uses Hypercom’s Wynid secure payment solution at 15,000 cash registers in its Market, City and Contact stores.

eAccess LLC, a subsidiary of Cubic Corp., announced that it has produced several thousand Super Bowl Commemorative EASY Cards for Miami-Dade Transit.

The NFL-sanctioned commemorative cards went on sale Feb. 1 and are being sold while supplies last from now until game day on Feb. 7.

The Welsh Assembly has called for reconsideration of a smart card transit system that would connect the towns and cities of Wales, according to squidcard.com.

The proposed ULTtra (Urban Light Transport) project calls for a contactless smart card system to grant passengers access to driverless pods that run on a track similar to that of a monorail.