NFC is like an itch you just cannot stop scratching. We (OK, I) get very cynical about it as I watch the Really Big Players delay trials because they are so worried about it not being 100 percent right on Day One that jobs may be at risk, departments might be reviewed. The most risk averse companies on the planet are trying to innovate and it is not a recipe for speedy, successful roll outs. So we get cynical, we criticize, we do surveys that show that 65 percent of operators do not actually see NFC as critical to mobile payments – and some us are even driven to writing poetry.
Yet NFC is as fascinating as it is frustrating – not just for the payments piece, but for the whole experience that it will enable. Back in February, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, one of the short, sharp conversations I had was with Andre Ponton, Business Development operative at Inside Secure. I think, actually by mistake, he summed up NFC in one sentence. “NFC is bigger than mobile payments,” he said, “and mobile payments are bigger than NFC.” I said, “Ah,” and “thank you,” and wrote it down.
And then, just in the last week or so I receive three very polite Press Releases about some things that this company, that may not even be on many people’s radar screens, is doing in NFC. First, they announced their PicoPulse “booster” chip, which “enables manufacturers to fit all components of an NFC card emulation and peer-to-peer mode solution into a standard SIM form factor.” Not being technical, all that means to me is that they have brought the potential of NFC into the world, as of now. Then they told me that one of their partners had won “a 2012 SESAMES Innovation Award in the identification/ID cards/health category, for their NFC-in-a-SIM solution.”
So there I was thinking that they had gone round the end of the NFC blockage and simply plugged NFC capabilities into a chip and obviously we would still have to wait for the Really Big Players to do the payments thing, when yet another very polite press release said that, with apologies for interrupting your morning, we thought you might be interested that we have had our payment applet certified by Mastercard which means that all of the payments potential of NFC can now be unlocked as well.
I feel my cynicism evaporating in the warmth of polite innovation and, Inside Secure, I am very happy to receive any and all excellent news about your next move.
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