I once spent many years (well about 2) slaving away inside Philips/NXP trying to pursuade:

a) phone manufacturers to put NFC into something other than the Nokia 6131 (see Nokia NFC history) to drive applications

b) app developers to deploy uses for NFC that would drive integration into phones

In fact I remember corridor  conversations along the lines of “Its the most perfect example of chicken and egg I have ever seen”.

We did loads of demos, for example trying to tempt Winning Moves Ltd with a set of Top Trumps cards replete with a Mifare sticker on each. In fact it looks like the idea is still being developed with this Windows 8 NFC game.

However, the roadblock appears to have been blasted away by a huge crop of the latest smartphones containing NFC. The list of NFC phones is now is well over 200. All the major manufacturers/models are there, Samsung, HTC, Asus, Nexus, LG, Nokia, Motorola. In fact there is a section at the base of the page on phones that don’t have NFC. Most notable are the Apple devices.

Anyway, we can see many many uses for this long-time-coming technology. In security, healthcare, hospitaity, retail, marine, logistics. Coupled with smartphones and a powerful server-side set of APIs and databases, this is a technology made for using.

Right, anyone up for an NFC card game ? Or an NFC enabled app even ?