Tagstand and the NFC Revolution
startupharbor.wordpress.com
startupharbor.wordpress.com
Revolutions are events that change the way a lot of people do things in a short amount of time, and very few deployments of NFC have actually done that as they usually end up as gimmicks replacing QR codes or other such poor UX ways that consumers interact with products or services because there is a mad arms race to monopolise the only significant use cases of NFC worth caring about (payment/public transportation ticketing and customer loyalty systems) meanwhile the scraps that can't be monopolised like "smart" posters and other forms of interaction that do little more than signal a user to open a URL with their device provide little incentive for the overheads and poor device support. Whilst some may think it's amazing that "bonking" (in El Reg parlance) your device against a sticker can check you into foursquare, millions in Japan are using a contactless coupon system that ties into devices to buy their meals and from the same device pay for the meal through a separate payment system and require no interaction from the user apart from placing their handset on the reader.
East Asia succeeded in its deployment of NFC like systems because the monopolisation of payments systems were worked out with carriers long before major deployment, because (at least in the Japanese market) carriers have the tightest stronghold on the hardware specifications in the devices sold for their networks and because transportation services, carriers and the companies creating the technology are all stake holders. (Felica Networks).
There's currently lot's of "potential" being seen in western trials of NFC technology, but still a very big chicken and egg problem: not enough devices support it, not enough carriers and transportation authorities seem to care about it, and consumers see little benefit.
In 2006, a year before the iPhone was released Mobile Suica was brought to the East Japanese market, NDEF was standardised by the NFC Forum, the first handset with NFC (the Nokia 6131) was released and a year later it was trialled by the Transport for London for use in their ticketing system but was rejected for being too slow at the gates. In 2009 NXP released the PN544 - currently one of the most common NFC chipsets used in mobile devices.
This technology has been around for several years now, and the press has talked about at length of carriers, transportation authorities, financial institutions and retailers "trialling" contactless payment in some form or another, very little has actually emerged in comparison. In addition there has been a handful of startup types either social network orientated or hardware/service orientated attempt to find some use case in the parts of the NFC specification (mostly surrounding read/write NDEF to card or SNEP to device) that can't be monopolised because as yet only one mobile OS maker (Blackberry) is opening the secure element - required for transactions. Nokia have also tried to push the non-secure parts of NFC when Symbian was more important to them in the market but are charging £20 for a single smart poster.
Perhaps there is some unfound use for NFC in both B2B and B2C that I, and the handfuls of other people have failed to see or the dozens of companies who've trialled this technology didn't make proper sense of. I'm still convinced this is a chicken and egg problem and the only reason it exists is from a lack of cohesion between multiple factors.
Not that I have anything against NFC -- it's a rather interesting technology, with many useful applications that QR codes don't have. But QR codes have several properties that NFC doesn't, and by definition can never have.
[1] http://www.nycresistor.com/2010/11/24/our-demoslam-entry-tas...
Multiple NFC patents have been filed, some NFC hires have been made. The 4S was the same phone case as the 4 so no new antennas could be put in.
I'd probably rate it at 30%:70% 2012:2013.