December 14, 2011
Earlier this month, WIMA, the global leader in NFC technology conferences, brought their five years of experience and insights on the future of mobile to the San Francisco for their first U.S. conference. In conjunction with the Principality of Monaco, WIMA has been organizing industry professionals, experts, and media from around the world to discuss the future and the potential of NFC technology to transform industries. (View NFC Briefing Room) In San Francisco, over 300 representatives from industries as diverse as retail, advertising, payments, social media, financial services, and more came together over two days in San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center to debate and chart the future of NFC technologies worldwide and, in particular, in the United States. Global leaders in NFC market tests and deployments, (many from Europe) joined with the best and brightest from the United States (many from Silicon Valley) to demonstrate the enormous potential for NFC and to highlight the remaining challenges on its path to wide adoption.
(Related Analysis: Should NFC Be Harder to Ignite Than GPS?)
One of the common themes from the San Francisco Congress was the sheer tremendous variety of mobile value propositions that can be propagated with NFC. The audience in attendance heard from a host of mobile innovators about a broad range of applications and services – many live in limited market deployments today – that NFC can enable. From gaming to social media applications, NFC capabilities demonstrated the potential to link mobile “cloud” services to localized, physical experiences. Compelling retailer services included a “future store” exhibit from a major French food retailer that gives consumers a smartphone application, NFC scanning capability, and dietary restriction advice -oh, and all of this available in a retail format that provides for a point-click-ship shopping experience that can squeeze into a store footprint about the size of a small coffee stand. Don’t want to go to the store? How about scanning the product tags pinned to the door of your fridge? Products purchased and shipped to your door within hours. Can the broad distribution of “smart wall” shopping panels like the Toys-R-Us scan-and-shop experience available in the C Terminal at LaGuardia be far behind?
Well, if the larger conference spoke to the potential of this technology, our keynote session that opened Day 2 explored the challenges of payments adoption for mobile NFC. Some suggested that the technology requires a more consistent, comprehensive, and manageable set of standards and services for managing security and access to NFC – and that perhaps the IP cloud can help. Others argued that the industry is nearly there, and that we just need to find the anchor application and use case to bind NFC to the consumer and drive adoption and use. Still other speakers argued for greater collaboration between the payments industry and the operator community, making the case that carriers are the best bet for bringing financial services to market. Another made the case that mobile wallets should be multifunction, and that the consumer should ultimately decide what works best for her. Novel concept, that! ;o)
So if this technology holds so much potential, why hasn’t it taken off? Maybe the answer lies, as many there asserted, in the currently low penetration of mobile devices with NFC capability? Or perhaps the challenge is in the attendant low level of penetration of NFC-enabled tags and acceptance devices that will supercharge the value propositions for NFC mobiles? Or maybe, just maybe, the value capture for NFC will come from a wealth of applications and services that deliver unique benefits to consumers, retailers, banks, advertisers, and a broader ecosystem of industries converging on mobile devices to create and manage commerce? Well, getting there will require convergence of a host of players on business standards and models. And if the recent dust-up between Google and Verizon is any indicator, everyone believes there is enough at stake to impede progress for the sake of staking out business model leadership.
Or maybe everyone just needs a sunny vacation to clear their heads and work together on moving the mobile NFC industry forward? If they can’t get to the beach this winter, perhaps booking a trip to WIMA’s April conference in Monaco is a better idea? There’s still work to do here, even in paradise.
We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to partner with innovators and disruptors.
Learn More