Proxama Blog

NFC - a Future Mobile Hero?

I was one of many who seriously enjoyed Heroes of the Mobile Screen earlier this week. Staged predominantly by the Mobile Monday team, it was a great event and the BFI Southbank was the perfect venue choice; it put me in a frame of mind to be entertained, challenged and informed and that’s exactly what was in store.

Naturally I was there with my Near Field Communication glasses on and was delighted that the day kicked off with a keynote from Kei Shimada of Infinita and included a quick look at how NFC is progressing in Japan. Anyone close to NFC will tell you that Japan, while interesting, doesn’t really have many practically useful lessons for other nations. Primarily, this is because of the relationship between the handset manufacturers and the mobile network operators. Dubbing them “ benevolent dictators”,  Kei Shimada described how the operators control the handset manufacturers with their un-walled gardens, preventing device fragmentation. On top of this, the operators paid nothing for their 3G spectrum licenses, so there’s a lot more spare cash to be spent on innovation. Specifically in terms of NFC, NTT DoCoMo embraced the technology in order to enter the financial services market. With around 60% market share at the time, they rolled out handsets with a payment application and financed the acceptance infrastructure too. Kei confirmed that 73% of handsets are NFC enabled but my heart sank when he followed this with the usage figure - just 18%. I spoke to Kei about this afterwards (another great thing about the day – the mobile heroes hung around and were very approachable) and was relieved to hear that he expects usage to more than double in the next year. He believes that the reason for the sluggish take up is that Japan has relatively low card usage and a preference for cash. But the popularity and success of NdFC for coupons and vouchers - there are 4 million active users - has certainly started to change payment habits too.

NFC got another mention later on when Terence Eden asked the mobile marketing panel how successful QR codes were, what future they had and whether they would be superseded by NFC. Citing a negligible response rate (something like 0.0001) in the UK earlier this year, George Nimeh of iris Digital brushed over Pepsi’s campaign, laughing that it was way more than NFC had achieved. And of course he’s right. But given the steady increase in handset availability and viable NFC accelerators such as the iCarte for the iPhone, I’m quietly confident that he’ll be giving a different answer before too long.

Then there was one final connection with mobile payment (and a mental link to NFC for me) in the excellent teenage dragons panel, where a handful of vendors pitched their mobile applications to 6 teenagers. The ideas pitched included voting, community photo sharing, music and mobile payment. Somehow the new mobile payment solution lost the value of “mobility” and was pitched as being available to use alongside other payment options – integrated in Facebook for example. One of the panel stated “I don’t think I’d want something more because I could pay for it with my mobile” and with humorous insight added “I wouldn’t see it and go  - Oh,  I feel like paying slightly differently today.”  I was left feeling somewhat relieved that working with teenagers and testing product and design ideas on them during the development process is a major part of the work we are doing on the Design Council NFC payment project. Hopefully we won’t end up with a product that leaves a group of articulate teens saying they “can’t see the point”.

It was a truly excellent day and I recommend dipping into the detailed write up, blogged live by Mobile Entertainment with Twitter sound bites here. I hope there will be more days like these and if there are, I hope we’ll be able to count NFC among the heroes before too long.

Tagged with

1 Comments. Posted by Victoria 11 December 2009

Share this post

Hi,

The reason I asked about QR codes was because I’d been to a presentation where Pepsi had enthused about them.
See http://shkspr.mobi/blog/index.php/2009/11/taking-the-internet-mobile-mobile-squared-roadshow/ for some details.

NFC’s main advantage over QR is that it can be done while moving at a fair speed.
QR’s main advantage over NFC is that it can be used at a distance.

I think there’s room for both of them - although it’s easier to install a QR reader on an existing phone than an NFC reader.

T

- Posted by Terence Eden  on  12/11  at  11:00 AM

Page 1 of 1 pages