NFC is back!?

I was just glad to see several reports praising the opportunities of NFC and documenting activities of several players that suddenly recognize NFC: the mobile network operators AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have started to test NFC according to Bloomberg, the online payments giant PayPal has partnered with Bling to implement payment, Facebook is experimenting with RFID according to AllFaceBook, Apple has hired an NFC expert and acquired several patents to implement NFC into the upcoming iphone 5 as TechCrunch reports, and new entrants as Google, Microsoft and others see NFC's advertising potential by linking a consumers' transaction history to their current location. Last but not least every "Nokia smartphone will have NFC, regardless of fact that the technology lacks a business model or any market demand", according to NFC World.

It would be great to deploy new consumer services current 1D-barcode applications are paving the road for and to revert on NFC which just provides a much better user experience than barcodes do [1]. Finally, we could move away from services where users deliberately have to scan items and arrive at services that push information to users once certain items enter the scanning range.

Back to the future of NFC - it has taken time, would be great to finally make it happen. Yet another step towards the internet of things for everybody...

[1] An Evaluation of Product Identification Techniques for Mobile Phones, F. von Reischach, F. Michahelles, D. Guinard, R. Adelmann, E. Fleisch, A. Schmidt, In Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC13 Conference in Human-Computer Interaction (Interact'09), Sweden, August 2009, [PDF] [Talk]