NFC - a "hand wavy" technology that may succeed

In the deluge of tech prediction lists which come out this time of year, one commonality stands out: NFC. NFC stands for Near Field Communication. Here you can see it at Number 3 on CNN's list for 2012. Like Microsoft Kinect or the Nintendo Wii, it is one of those technologies you can literally describe using "hand-waving". This is because the most highly cited usage for NFC is to enable you to wave your phone at a payment terminal and pay for goods.

Although mobile payments is the most commonly mentioned case for NFC, it has many other applications. For example, Transport for London plans to use NFC cards with its Oyster readers. And, back at Halloween, Mark Diodati from Gartner published a blog post (and Smiths reference in the title?) about the usage of NFC to literally open doors. The description of the experiment, where students used either a modified phone case or a MicroSD card with an attached antenna, reminded me of the early attempts to place digital certificates and private keys onto mobile phones via battery case appendages, circa 2000, in an ill-fated attempt to "PKI-enable" phones. That was ahead of its time, but here I think NFC is about to happen. 2012 may not be the "year of NFC" but it will be the year it continues its adoption, as gradually more and more people have an NFC-enabled phone in their hands.

As full disclosure, one of the large NFC players uses Vordel Gateways in its infrastructure. So I guess I have some other interest in NFC taking off. But, really it is one of those technologies which just makes too much sense to not take off in the coming years.