Smart Urban Spaces was present and visible in the NFC World Congress organized in Nice, France this week. NFC World Congress is the world’s first truly international exhibition and conference dedicated to Near Field Communications business.
For the majority of consumers, NFC still remains unknown although they actually might already be using NFC based services such as transport. One of the main messages coming from the different participants in the expo was to ensure easy and secure contactless services. Dr Annabelle Gawer from Imperial College Business School had good insights on how to create this by openness and creating common platforms for the NFC ecosystem.It was interesting to meet up with and hear more about companies such as Thinglink, Connecthings and Airtag. There are many players doing good things but bigger collaboration seems to be lacking in some areas.
Many of the services presented link to payment and loyality services which might be the services most think NFC will suit best for. Although our pilots have been based on cityservices and multiuse of the already existing RFID based travelcard, are payment and loyality also issues that link to these. Using NFC handset as a reader rather than a tool seems to be something discriptive to our current projects.
However, in a wider scale it’s good to know that things with NFC are actually happening and many services and products are already there. What we now need is more NFC phones to the market, so let’s hope we’ll see that happening soon!
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