Wednesday, 21 May 2008

NFC Key Enabler of Future Mobile Services

Technologies such as Near Field Communication (NFC) are enabling a completely new segment of mobile applications - proximity services or local services - but the industry first needs to settle several critical technical and pedagogic issues.

According to analyst firm Berg Insight, the market is still guarded and fragmented, but in the long run consumers will not agree to handling multiple devices, cards, accounts and passwords. A long-term pragmatic view and initial cooperation will be necessary to enable the paradigm shift that will morph the mobile phone into a terminal for communicating with intelligent objects in the environment.

“Local contact-less services are already available to over 50 million mobile users that can shop, travel and get information by just waving their phones over readers”, said Sabine Ehlers, associate analyst, Berg Insight.

In Japan for example the service is well-established and a great success in terms of number of readers installed, service partners linked and subscriber terminals in use.

When it comes to actually applying the technology however, the mass of consumers apparently need time to change deep-rooted behaviours.

In Europe the development is held back by uncertainty about business models and the lack of coordination between different players.

Mobile operators especially regard the new business field with caution due to its lack of obvious revenues for network owners.