14 - Near Field Communications: The Smart Choice for Enabling Connectivity

Abstract

The concept of near field communications (NFC) is based upon the premise of enabling through proximity. It holds the key to a smarter, wirelessly-connected next generation of life-style enhancing products. Radio frequency id (RFID) is a barcode replacement technology and seems to be comfortable with its tag. NFC, on the other hand, does have some overlapping use cases with RFID, but it seems as though NFC dominates a genre of consumer electronic products easing numerous use case scenarios such as connectivity, payment, and entry. Developers are now in a position to take hold of the NFC promise and maximize its market potential within a wide range of products. NFC promotes a different set of applications and to a large extent doesn't conflict too much with RFID's barcode replacement technology. NFC-based applications can be categorized into three groups, namely, (i) key based—this category of application uses NFC as a key to unlock another service. For example, a so-called smart poster containing NFC tags, which promote a new product or service. Simply touching the cellular phone or PDA device against the embedded tag (or hotspot), would unlock the service and transmit marketing data to the cellular device in seconds; (ii) peer-to-peer applications. NFC is used to enable communication between two devices, such as a cellular phone, PDA, camera, printer, and set top box.