Near Field Communications (NFC) is finally here. After a wait of more than 7 years since the initial announcement, handsets are being made available in large quantities and major players like mobile operators, banks and payment schemes are establishing partnerships to take NFC into the business and consumer domains.
Download Trevor’s White Paper on Location Based Marketing and Mobile Phones
If you’ve found this page it’s likely you already have an awareness of NFC, so we won’t waste your time by repeating the fundamentals. If you do want an explanation, you can go to Using NFC. Please come back when you’re up to speed.
Please see Trevor’s blog for more discussions about Near Field Communications.
Fenbrook Consulting has been involved in NFC since before the original announcement in 2004, and has watched the evolution of the technology and business relationships closely. In that time, the application areas which NFC addresses have evolved, and the players are lining up to capture a share of what they expect to be a large and exciting new market. After all, what could be more attractive than tapping into the devices that so many people carry with them at all times, with a whole range of new possibilities to make life more convenient, immediate, and cool?
So, where specifically will NFC make a difference, and how can Fenbrook help? Based on our experience with contactless cards, and the extra functionality offered by NFC, here are our tips to watch out for:
- Transport (Mass Transit)
– NFC offers an ideal way to pay for and use transport tickets. As contactless transport readers become more common, it is possible to use NFC phones to load tickets and show their validity. But NFC is much more powerful than that, because it enables users to buy and download tickets over the air – at a time and place convenient to them. And for the Transport Operator, NFC based smart ticketing means not having to bother with the non-core business of managing a population of cards. - Higher Education – Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are increasingly adopting smart cards for a variety of campus applications. Campus cards are used for: ID, Access Control, Cashless Payment, Attendance Monitoring (download Fenbrook’s White Paper on this subject), Libraries, Parking, Students’ Union, and more. All these applications could reside on an NFC mobile phone – and the university concerned can be much more flexible in the way it manages and updates the applications of an individual student or staff member. NFC handsets can also be used as readers, so it’s possible to use this as a cheap reader of (for instance) student cards to register attendance and improve student retention – and data can be transmitted to and from a host computer over the air. Please visit White Papers and Downloads for Trevor’s White Paper on NFC Mobile Phones- a solution to HEI Attendance Monitoring
- Events – Most people attending an event (could be a festival, football match, conference, exhibition, county show, attraction…) take their mobile phones with them. Often they take pictures and videos of their experiences to send to friends to show them what they’re missing. In the future, these same devices will be used to access special areas, pay for food and beverage, download money, and more. All this with the convenience of not having to move far from their current location, just by tapping their phone to a reader. Among other things, this will mean that the event goer doesn’t need to carry cash, and the event organiser learns more about the customer’s preferences, allowing marketing to that individual to be tailored in the future.
- Location Based Marketing – NFC offers a powerful new tool to companies to market direct to consumers. Using NFC (assuming the customer gives permission), it is possible to prompt customers to make enquiries
by tapping their phones (e.g. “smart posters”). It will be possible to prompt impulse purchases and build up a detailed picture of an individual’s preferences, spending patterns, and whereabouts. What a company does with this new data is another story.
Fenbrook Consulting can help. Our associates are experts in NFC technology and applications. We can take an unstructured idea and turn it into a well worked business plan. We can build prototypes so that new applications can be tested and honed. And we can work to implement the plan, in an ordered and affordable manner, to gain the maximum results.
If you are a small or medium sized enterprise looking to take advantage of the new opportunities presented by NFC, contact us. We will help you get ahead of the game and achieve your goals.
Please see Trevor’s blog for more discussions about Near Field Communications.