NFC Forum : NFC for Consumers

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NFC for Consumers

How NFC will change your daily life

Making purchases, accessing facilities and transportation systems, and getting information on the fly is about to get much easier. Consider the intuitive simplicity of holding an NFC-enabled mobile phone close to a terminal to purchase products or services – just touch and go. Think about how easy it would be to set up your wireless home office just by holidng your PC, keyboard, display, and mouse close together. Imagine downloading an MP3 of your new favorite song in seconds while you're on the road. How would you like to stroll right into a sports arena without needing paper tickets? Consider how simple public transportation would be without cash, cards, or tokens.

Millions of people around the globe already have experience with NFC-enabled products and services. In Europe and Asia, trials of this exciting new technology have successfully illustrated how people carrying mobile phones or smart cards with built-in NFC can make purchases, get directions, exchange information, and buy transportation simply by bringing them close to NFC-enabled devices embedded in:

Information kiosks
Retail registers
Advertising signs
Street posters
Vending machines
Thousands of other devices, systems and signage

Rapid progress has been made since 2004 toward an NFC-enabled world. Strategy Analytics forecasts mobile phone-based contactless payments will facilitate over $36 billion of worldwide consumer spending by 2011. According to research firm Frost & Sullivan, one third of all mobile phones will be NFC-equipped in a span of three to five years.

End users of this technology benefit from comprehensive specifications developed by the NFC Forum, designed to make NFC devices interoperable. NFC Forum members are developing products that enable consumers to pay for physical goods, enter controlled environments like arenas or parking areas, and access digital services anywhere, at any time, using any NFC-Forum-compliant device.