transport. It is not used much to pay for goods in shops -- even though leading Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo made a huge investment in helping retailers pay for the rollout of Felica-enabled payment terminals. And when the iPhone and other smartphones started flooding into the Japanese market, many users dumped their Felica feature phones for these new handsets, casting doubt on the stickiness that the Felica mobile wallet was meant to provide. In South Korea, where 20 million NFC-enabled phones are expected to be in circulation by yearend -- amounting to around 40% penetration -- both take-up and awareness of the technology remain poor. Only one in 10 NFC-phone users are using the technology; many can't see that it adds much value to what can already be done with plastic NFC cards (which are widely deployed in Korea); and around 50% of Korean consumers still don't know what is NFC. A big barrier in South Korea -- and one that it shares with the vast majority of other countries in the world -- is a scarcity of NFC-enabled payment machines in shops. Only around 4% of South Korean retailers have deployed NFC point-of-sale (POS) terminals -- even though these are widely deployed in public transport and taxis. Retailer doubts Getting retailers to adopt of NFC is proving to be the hardest technical challenge in enabling contactless mobile payments. And what makes it a particularly hard challenge is that it is prey to the horribly tricky "chicken-and-egg" dilemma that has