Here is a video showcasing the first mobile social media service that uses NFC, which is featured at Oulu NFC Week. The company introducing Hot in the City NFC mobile application is called VTT and has won the WIMA 2009 NFC Forum Global Competition 2009 Research Track. You can download the ‘Hot in the City’ mobile application for your phone in order to use the service (if you have a compatible NFC phone and happen to be in a location with one of their ‘tags’).
NFC has been around for a while now but not many device manufacturers have implemented the technology into handsets yet. This has probably to do with the fact that in order for the technology to be useful, a network of NFC ‘tags’ needs to be prevalent. These tags can trigger ‘events’ such as a post/update on a social networking platform, launch media content, send messages to friends etc. At the moment Nokia is the biggest supporter of NFC from the main device manufacturer pool.
Experimentation of NFC usage for micropayments is seen as a possible path to mass adoption as this early Wells Fargo and Visa NFC experiment testifies. They conducted a three-phase pilot project in the San Francisco Bay area. The pilot intended to test consumer interest in using cell phones to function as contact-less credit or debit cards. Credit card companies have more recently launched contactless credit card systems such as the MasterCard PayPass, but at the moment a very limited number of retailers have the scanners installed at their outlets. Of course in Japan and South Korea this technology is being used for payments at petrol stations, as a replacement ATM card, in vending machines and other applications.
Companies like violet that produces the Mir:ror, have a different approach to making the technology more widespread. Their Ztamp DIY kits enable users to ‘tag’ objects. You could try using them with a mobile phone (replacing the need to dish out for an NFC enabled phone), although Mir:ror does say that it may affect the NFC chip’s performance.
The technology’s usage as a social networking ‘extension’ brings with it obvious privacy concerns though, which depending on cultural or legal establishments will or will-not be accepted entirely. Overall though, due to the breadth of possible applications and potential very low cost per unit, NFC looks to have a future at the moment.
You can find out more about NFC (Near Field Communication) on Wikipedia and from the NFC forum .