Yesterday, Google announced its NFC payment system: Google Wallet.
Reading 90% of the articles about this subject over the past few years (aside from the plethora of “Will / won’t the next iPhone have NFC” stories), you could be forgiven for thinking that NFC was just a way of putting a payment card in your phone.
Mobile contactless payment is a great piece of functionality and one which many of us (myself included) have been longing for but it’s hardly new: Japan has had it for years, with the FeLiCa system embedded in most handsets. It’s well-liked, trusted and very broadly accepted. Over here, the main hurdles have been political rather than technical.
Payment is a fascinating story on its own and it’s very tough to predict who will come up with the dominant solution, but we decided to write a series of articles about some other aspects of NFC to demonstrate how it’s capable of so much more.
What we have been pondering is: assuming that phones have NFC capabilities, what does that allow you to achieve outside of the holy trinity of:
- Payments
- Transport / event tickets
- Vouchers / loyalty cards.
Some of these other use cases are well-known today, such as key tags for access control systems (door locks), and others will become better known soon, such as NFC-based check-ins for location-based services such as FourSquare.
It’s our belief that NFC is far from another gimmick and has the potential to actually change the way we interact with the physical world in a profound fashion.
This series of articles will dig further into these areas and look at what can be done, the challenges faced and some possible ways that they could be achieved.
What’s coming up?
Coming soon, we look at how NFC can improve the top-up method for pre-pay mobile phones, help people with hearing and sight difficulties, stop your washing machine annoying you, make your trips to shops and restaurants faster, improve your product selection experience, share media around the home, expand the functionality of products, improve user interfaces and allow you to build great cross-platform libraries.
But first, it would be slightly crazy of us not to even glance at the world of NFC payments: it’s going to be the most commonly known use for NFC and the main focus of all the companies involved for the next few years.