Near Field Communication, approved as a standard seven years ago, has gone viral just this past week.
Google’s CEO led off his interview at the Web 2.0 Summit with a demonstration, Research in Motion said BlackBerrys would have it and AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon announced the ISIS joint venture to develop a national NFC network in the US.
But what is it and why the sudden attention?
NFC has similarities in its applications to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology used in contactless smart cards.
You probably already have one of these types of cards – I have a London Underground Oyster card and a San Francisco Bay Area Clipper card which I can hold up close to a reader to pass and pay my way through stations. Barclays bank has just sent me a contactless-enabled debit card to pay for small items in stores without the need for swiping.
But NFC is smarter than RFID. It can switch between three different modes.
In reader/writer mode, NFC devices can read dumb NFC tags and extract information from them. This was Eric Schmidt’s demonstration (photo courtesy of Web 2.0 Summit) with a smartphone running the next version of Android, codenamed Gingerbread. Its NFC chip read a tag that contained the information that he was at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco and the Android software brought up a screen of information about the hotel.
Smart posters exist containing NFC tags that allow devices to tap them and download coupons, music samples or movie trailers, for example.
News of an NFC tour guide pilot project at the Pompidou Centre in Paris was revealed on Thursday, where teenagers are using NFC-enabled mobile phones to wave them in front of exhibits and get information.
They can also use the second, peer-to-peer, mode of NFC to share their experiences with friends – just bumping their phones together allows information collected to be exchanged.
Virtual business cards and digital photos are other examples of what can be exchanged with NFC-enabled phones.
In addition, Apple is rumoured to be including NFC in the “iPhone 5″ next year and there are reports it could also put it in its Macs, so an IPhone owner could sync information with his laptop or computer just by touching them with the iPhone.
Apple’s interest in NFC perhaps answers the why now? question. It has been building up a patent portfolio of NFC ideas this year that has the competition concerned and eager to come up with their own solutions.
Finally, NFC has a card emulation mode that can make a phone appear to be a contactless smart card, enabling that mobile wallet/transportation function. Mr Schmidt said Google would also be interested in handling such transactions, which would represent a breakthrough for its Checkout service.
So NFC is coming to a smartphone near you in 2011. It should allow you to make payments and exchange data with other people and devices, as well as read information about where you are and what are the contents of a product you touch.
It will be used by carriers to sell more services, by Apple to sell more phones and by Google to sell more ads alongside all the data it sends your way.
