Is this the Year of Near Field Communications

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a technology that enables a device to communicate with another at a maximum distance of around 20cm or less. Currently, mobile phone manufacturers , financial organisations and mobile network providers are attempting to apply this technology to Smartphones and other handheld devices because of the opportunity to enable the consumer to use commercial services more easily. As more phone manufacturers start to include NFC chips in their mobiles, the need for applications will increase. Already marketers are looking at the possibilities of using the NFC interface alongside their traditional marketing methods such as posters. Information could also be passed to the NFC device, allowing the user to gain more information about a product or service, so this would be an efficient means of advertising. For example, it would be possible to transmit a URL to the target device so that the user would then be able to navigate to a website to get further information about a product or service in which they are interested. This is where having NFC enabled on a smartphone could prove to be very useful for consumers, enabling them to find out the best price for a product before committing to the purchase. There are many uses for NFC. They can also be used to transfer tokens at airports, which would eliminate the need for boarding cards. The passenger would check-in using their mobile and then reconfirm by swiping their phone again at the departure gate. There is also the possibility of them being able to store biometric information, which is becoming more widely developed for security. NFC devices can be used in conjunction with image display devices like digital photo frames for displaying images very quickly. All the user needs to do is touch the photo frame with the image ready to be sent, then the connection is established and the image is sent over Bluetooth. NFC is backward compatible with RFID therefore it is perfectly feasible to use an NFC enabled device as an RFID key. This can be used with traditional RFID access control systems as a replacement for the key fobs and cards currently used. Wireless car keys using NFC are being developed by BMW with i