Sony Corp and Motorola Inc say they plan to jointly develop smart cards combining contact and non-contact formats for use in electronic commerce, according to a Nihon Keizai Shimbun report. First sales of the cards are expected in the spring of 1998 in the hope and the two companies plan to offer the first such cards used in actual transactions and thus establish a de facto standard for the dual-format cards. Contact cards have to be inserted into a reader whereas a non-contact card can be read from a short distance via radio waves beamed by the reader. By combining both formats, Sony and Motorola hope to offer multiple functions such as electronic money, credit cards, telephone cards or commuter passes for trains and buses.
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