The UK already has a big old investment in
contactless technology with London's rather successful Oystercard travel scheme, but now the whole Kingdom can get a taste for airborne payments thanks to a new initiative from
McDonald's and
Visa. The two giants of commerce are uniting to bring NFC tech to all of the former's 1,200 fast food restaurants within the UK, allowing hungry Brits to pay for meals costing up to £15 by simply waving their credit card in front of the till Obi-wan-style. Of course, the real excitement of such large-scale NFC proliferation is in the potential to use those automated tills with your Nexus S (which has an NFC chip
built right in) and other devices coming up this year that look set to feature the technology. So yeah, Visa had better be working hard on putting together some mobile apps.
