On Track Innovations Ltd. thinks it has a solution to the issue of too few smartphones supporting NFC: a dongle. The company announced its new COPNI Wave (which stands for Contactless Payment and NFC Insert) product, a dongle that users can insert into the audio jack of any smartphone to enable a number of NFC services from payments to access.

Similar in appearance to dongles used for mobile point-of-sale solutions (it looks a lot like Intuit's GoPayment dongle), the COPNI Wave eliminates the need for built-in NFC capabilities. OTI said its COPNI Wave is completely agnostic, meaning that it will work with any smartphone

"With COPNI Wave we're providing a quick-to-market NFC solution that can be deployed by myriad businesses that see the value in joining the mobile payment market to expand their customer base and their revenues," said  Oded Bashan, chairman and CEO of OTI.

Along with support for mobile payment applications from MasterCard and Visa, OTI said its COPNI Wave was designed to support transportation ticketing, loyalty programs, information retrieval and more.

Headquartered in Israel, OTI creates and markets a number of security and identification solutions. It will officially unveil the COPNI Wave product at this year's CARTES 2012 Exhibition & Conference in Paris beginning Nov. 6.

For more stories on this topic, visit the NFC/Contactless research center.