Paying almost everything with your cell phone
It is now several years that Japanese can use (and do) their cell phones to pay at a cashier in a department store, buy a ticket for the public transport and get a coke from a vending machine. They have been using NFC, Near Field Communications, to let their cell phone exchange information with the cash register and vending machines.
In the other parts of the world this system has not been available. Telecom Operators have been shy (reluctant) in making their customers using their cell phone credit to buy other things but communications services fearing to lose revenues. The absence of a unique NFC standard didn’t help either. In some countries regulations restrict payment transaction management to bank and do not allow Telecom Operators to do that. Topping it all, cell phones manufacturers did not release any models with embedded NFC capabilities (this is the usual chicken and egg problem),
But now the situation seems about to change. The NFC Forum will be starting in a few days the certification process for NFC devices (the standard has been released later last year) and ATT, Verizon and T-Mobile have started to cooperate to launch a commerce network based on NFC.
Nokia has recently declared that most of the new phones they will put on the market in 2011 will have NFC embedded.
To complete the list, the rumor of Apple including NFC in its iPhone 5 is strong. And it is likely that the transaction will be managed through the iTunes Store. This is a first explanation on why Apple has been developing a huge data centre lately.
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26796/page1/
I am pretty sure that in the next 3 years we are going to see an explosion of cell phone based wallet in Europe as well. That is likely to create a new ecosystem with plenty of apps able to record what we buy, ready to show us our spending habits and creating a data base of all of our shopping spree. That data base, in turns, will be a data mining field for yet other apps. I would be surprised if I will not be very surprised by the variety of apps that will become available and by the way my shopping habits will change.
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