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Comment by sgrove | Hacker News Reader

I was aghast when I read that the Square COO didn't see much value in NFC (http://gigaom.com/2011/09/26/square-mobilize-2011/). After spending a lot of time in Seoul where it's possible to pay for a ton of stuff via T-money card (a clipper-card-like NFC card for the public transit system), I hate pulling out my card to swipe or counting cash.

NFC can phenomenally improve the experience of nearly everything we do right now, and I expect Tagstand to bring the NFC revolution to the US.

Can't help but be a bit jealous of these guys though, their execution has been amazing, they seem to be doing everything right! If you're looking to do some NFC stuff, I'd recommend Tagstand in a heartbeat.

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Thank you.

I think Square are ultimately technology agnostic, but they don't want the "nfc = payments" meme to spread, not quite sure why. But yes, after travelling through Asia and seeing nfc payments in action, I totally agree.

The Hong Kong anecdote is true. I was surprised that places wouldn't accept credit card but would happily accept my transit card for payments. It's a big opportunity in other emerging markets.

  > they don't want the "nfc = payments" meme to spread,
  > not quite sure why

Maybe because it takes away from the idea that Square will be able to dominate? Maybe they see the spread of NFC as a way that the current credit card companies can jump on the tech bandwagon and edge Square out? Dunno.

Square reminds me of the Netbook in 2009. They were very successful in the short time but they weren't moving forward and everyone knew the tablet would eventually rule.

NFC will eventually take over and they'll either fade out or have to rethink.

re: square -- consider the source.

it makes sense that the square coo would be "anti nfc." the notion of "nfc payments" as the way of the future detracts from the vision he's pitching -- that is "square payments" are the way of the future.

whether nfc ends up being integrated into square or not, and whether or not nfc is useful in the payments vertical is irrelevant to him. square likely wants you to think about square and only square when you think about mobile payments going forward...

Have you seen https://squareup.com/cardcase? It looks like it leapfrogs NFC.

What is so phenomenal about what Tagstand is doing? It appears to be just client side NFC with a library like zxing

http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/

What am I missing?

NFC offers two big opportunities. The first is NFC as hardware, which is what Tagstand is doing. I agree that this is a fairly straightforward business.

The second, and arguably much larger, opportunity is the software component, which we haven't really seen yet. There's a whole world of programs and services that can be built around this hardware once it's in use.

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