NFC
Most of the advances in NFC came at year-end, but they came fast. Apple quietly recruited an NFC expert in August, but hasn’t made any announcements about the technology yet. RIM did the same in November. However, Google’s Android mobile operating system – the latest version known as Gingerbread – now supports the data transfer technology, short for near-field communications. Although limited for now, full support is arriving soon. Also, over the course of the year, we’ve seen preliminary initiatives, programs and announcements involving NFC from PayPal (via a partnership with NFC-related startup Bling Nation), Bank of America, Visa and others. As 2010 draws to a close, Visa has officially launched In2Pay, an NFC-enabled mobile payments solution, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have teamed up on Isis, a carrier-led NFC mobile payments service and the technology got an official trademark.
Vishal Jain, a mobile analyst with The 451 Group says that NFC and location-based services “will together drive mobile advertising into an entirely new dimension unlike web based performance advertising that has always focused on generating awareness. The effect would be seen in how loyalty programs, advertisers and POS terminals work in tandem. Availability and understanding of geo-targeted data, and NFC tags will enable the end to end reach and conversion process of a campaign.”
And Thomas Husson, a research analyst at Forrester, agrees that NFC means more than mobile payments. “It will enable a range of applications and services from various industries, linking together mobile marketing, mobile CRM, and mobile commerce.” He, however, may disagree with it appearing on this list, saying that NFC “had some traction in 2010 but still suffered from the lack of a critical mass of devices,” but that next year, “the market will finally move away from the trial stage in regions where NFC infrastructure is in place.”
Jeff Miles, director of mobile transactions at NXP, definitely believes this was NXP’s year. “Although NXP co-invented NFC jointly with Sony in 2002, 2010 was clearly the year that NFC made its entrée into the heart of the consumer’s world,” he said. “With almost all the world’s top manufacturers and carriers backing the technology and developers accessing open source NFC implementation, 2010 opened the gates for new ways of extending the reach of mobile devices, driving creative applications and adding real value to consumers.”
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