Public transport operator Stagecoach Group has launched a trial of NFC bus tickets in partnership with Everything Everywhere. It’s enabling some customers on the Stagecoach bus network in Cambridgeshire to use their Orange ‘Quick Tap’ NFC phones as tickets.

The scheme uses the Department of Transport’s preferred ITSO ticketing technology and is described as the UK’s first Government-standard commercial deployment of mobile contactless transport ticketing.

Everything Everywhere says AGA Rangemaster has selected its M2M Management Platform and Orange UK SIM cards for the new AGA iTotal Control oven.

The oven offers remote control via an Android or Apple iOS app, a web browser or text message.

Everything Everywhere has completed the final stage of the ‘big switch-on’ integration project it started in October 2010.

Orange and T-Mobile customers will now be able to use the other network automatically if they start to lose their 3G signal; a service the company is calling ‘Smart Signal Sharing’.

Mark Bridge writes:

This story starts with Mercury One2One and Orange. They were acquired by Deutsche Telekom (which changed One2One’s name to T-Mobile) and France Telecom. Next, Everything Everywhere was created to run the T-Mobile and Orange brands in the UK.

The latest quarterly financial results from Everything Everywhere reveal that 71% of ‘pay monthly’ customers now have smartphones; an increase of 14 percentage points from the Q1 2011 figure of 57%.

An increase of 151,000 post-pay customers since the previous quarter, along with a drop of 494,000 prepay users, means that 49% of customers on Orange and T-Mobile UK networks currently have a post-pay contract.