Products & Services
The poster child of ‘touch to pay’
By Mike on 18 April 2008
LONDON, UK – My recent chat with Jeremy Belostock, Head of NFC at Nokia, about the future of Near Field Communication, helped reinforce a personal belief that touch-to-pay and NFC has the potential to permanently alter the way we behave with our phones, and that it can in fact have a significantly positive environmental effect.
For this to happen, NFC needs to deliver an effortless experience in order to engage us without thinking. So when handed the new NFC poster-child handset, the Nokia 6212 classic, all I could hope was, “please work”.
I touch my handset with another and immediately both screens light up to exchange business cards. The first hurdle. Tapping an NFC alarm tag brings up the alarm clock on my phone, the idea being it can be positioned at your bedside for easy access. Touching another tag sucks up a MP3, as it might if you touched an NFC-enabled poster as you walk down the street. Then I exchange a photo with a tap. It’s hugely encouraging that this experience of exchanging information for payment, ticketing or whatever suitable scenario, is as seamless as it should be.
The challenge now has to be establishing widespread NFC-enabled environments, which is something else Jeremy Belostock touches on in our recent talk (see it here).
Do you think getting NFC to become a part of our lives must be a slow and gradual process, or must these touch environments evolve rapidly to succeed?
Related posts:
- Nokia 6216 classic marks the coming of age of Near Field Communication
- Nokia 5230 comes with a touch of colour
- Sites that look fantastic on Nokia touch devices
Tags | Near Field Communication
April 18th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Mike,
Carita and I have a pair of phones here to play with. We’ll get our butts in gear and do a few videos for people to get a feel for this.
Ta,
Charlie
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April 19th, 2008 at 6:57 am
The key is exactly what was stated in the article: created NFC environments. For that to work best, the devices have to be placed in idea, not just techie-ideal situations. For example, there should be an application on tap that does price comparisons. Using the NFC-enabled handset, one goes into a store, taps a few items, and then gets pertinent compare info. Connect this to the store’s wifi (or website) and one should be able to see coupons and other deals.
Take this a step further, talk to insurance issuers. Auto insurance folks always give you a map book. Instead of giving just a book, they give the person the ability to “bump” a map onto their device that shows where they are covered and service areas in case of an emergency.
If you will, NFC has a solid future, but it has to have practical usage driving its adoption for it to be a consumer-leading technology.
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