The industry has now been waiting for quite some time to see the handsets that will make the dream of near field communication (NFC) possible. For a long time this was more like a no contest (NC). It is not like we do not see the benefits of tap-and-go. If all handsets were properly designed and NFC was available like blue tooth and WiFi, life would have been a better place.This is why it was such interesting news when Apple announced the appointment of Benjamin Vigier (a NFC experts and one of the best guys in the industry) (Read here). Benjamin has been working on NFC technology since 2004 and was responsible for the Starbucks NFC project when he was with mFoundry, so he is pretty experienced in this space. It is unlikely that he was hired for anything else. Does this mean that we will now see life change?
Well for a start, let us agree that anything that Apple does, one should take seriously and Apple have a number of good tools in place to make this happen. However, they are still confronted by the two key stumbling blocks in making this real and I would be interested in their strategy in how to overcome this:
- How to cater for the secure element, especially from a personalisation perspective.
- What to do about the basic lack of acquiring infrastructure in most (all?) countries.