Crazy Ideas

Some crazy ideas for the future with NFC are:

Eliminating flash memories. No more USB's, just use your phone and its SD card to transfer files from one computer to another for a presentation.

Eliminating office buildings. Consumers can buy things online with their phones, and employees can work at home using their phones. (Virtual Workplace). Completely eliminates commute costs
Eliminating coins and bills. We don't need cash if we can just tap the POS with our phones.

Eliminating phones. Who needs NFC integrated phones when we can embed NFC chips into our hands/other parts of our bodies?

Future Uses

In the future, NFC will be used for many things.

1. Wallet-Free Money Transactions: Phones tap the POS to pay for an item
2. Health Care: Hospitals can keep track of nurse/doctor check-ins and can even notify what treatment a patient should receive, releasing it to them accordingly
3. Smart Objects:  Ex. summoning a waiter by scanning a NC tag, tapping a NFC-enabled car dashboard to change seating and entertainment preferences, or even purchasing "tap to buy" items in a catalogue
4. Social Link: Exchanging numbers and business cards will be done with just a tap f the phone

Relevant Companies

NFC functionality already exists in 100+ different smartphone brands including:

•  RIM’s BlackBerry Bold 9930 as well as the BlackBerry 9380
• Google Android’s Nexus Q and S
•  Rumored: Apple’s upcoming release of the iPhone 5

NFC functionality is also being released in countless tablets and PDA devices.

Vingcard Elsafe has recently unveiled an NFC-compatible lock for hotel room doors, taking away card-swipe security hardware from the exterior face of the door.

Fujifilm’s SmartPix kiosks – allows for transfer from NFC-enabled device to connect to the kiosk in order to print photos.

MoneyMobile: money payment service offered by Emirates National Bank of Dubai – largest banking group in the Middle East.

Objecs, sold under the brand name RosettaStone, enables detailed information about a deceased person in an NFC tag that is attached to their gravestone. To access the information, simply touch an NFC-enabled phone to the headstone.

China and Germany: “Touch&Travel” ticketing systems for public transportation

India: aTuch has implemented NFC-based ticketing transactions in box offices

It's just a matter of time before office buildings and households become integrated with NFC.

Disadvantages

Along with the start-up costs, there are two other disadvantages. If NFC were used in office buildings, it may begin to blur the lines of office and leisure, due to the ease of taking work home with you just by using your phone. NFC can also be seen as disruptive technology. Technology can be considered disruptive when it makes another technology become obsolete. If we are able to transfer files using our phones, we will no longer need USB's, making them obsolete. The biggest problem with NFC is security. If someone were to lose their phone, the person that found it could have access to a multitude of things including high security office's, debit and credit cards, and potentially someone's NFC integrated household door. Employees will need to be extra careful about where they place their phones.

Benefits

After getting past start-up costs and installation, the benefits would begin to outweigh the costs. Instead of using keys and access cards for everything, we could cut down to one phone per employee that opens every lock, we could give and restrict access easier and we could save paper by doing things like sending paystubs to phones. Costs like office supplies would decrease since everyone can use their phones to transport documents; employees can choose to either print or keep documents on their phone instead of having them printed for them by human resources.

Moore's law also shows some benefits for NFC. Moore's law states that the number of transistors on integrated circuits will double approximately every two years. Since NFC technology uses integrated circuits, the technology will continue to improve, and will continue to become cheaper in the future. 

Start-Up Costs

The first thing we realized about NFC, is how expensive the start-up costs would be. If a company wants to use NFC chips and readers for opening locked doors instead of having tons of keys, they would have to integrate every door and every employee that has to use said doors would have to have a smart phone with NFC technology to open the doors. Getting an entire building integrated would take lots of time and money.

Definition

Started our work on near field communication (NFC) today. NFC is a protocol that uses radio waves to establish signals between two separate devices integrated with an NFC chip and within close proximity (around four inches or less). We'll start looking at the costs of NFC tomorrow.