The NFC story presented by the general and business media is, in our opinion, decidedly rosy compared to actual reality. In a sense, the frequent coverage devoted to NFC is a good thing - recall the adage, "any publicity is good publicity." However, this saying must be taken with a grain (or two) of salt in the context of technology markets, because excessive publicity can lead to hype...and hype may in turn lead to unfulfilled expectations. During this QuickCast, John Shuster discusses some of the key factors limiting NFC adoption and strategies ecosystem stakeholders can use to drive adoption.
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Limited infrastructure and device availabilitySlow adoptionDifficult to justify/Lack of education Low supply-side revenuesFacilitated adoption in APAC and EMEA due to existing infrastructure, higher user comfort levels and government initiatives.Majority of revenues from horizontal applications like payment, ticketing, marketing and access controlIncreased enterprise investment in NFC solutions for internal (i.e., non customer-facing) applications, including physical security/access control, logical/network security/access control, workforce monitoring/management and tracking/tracing applications.The emergence of alternative (i.e., non-smartphone) NFC device form factors during 2012 and beyond will further broaden NFCâs appeal as well as the potential use cases it can serveâboth for enterprise and consumer end users.Governmental investment in NFC initiatives in certain country markets (e.g., Korea, France) will help drive regional contactless infrastructure deployment, application development and adoption.NFC application opportunities/use cases range from the very simple (P2P, pairing, information access) to the more complex (contactless payment, e-commerce). VDC expects most near-term activity will be related to applications that are relatively simple to deploy, do not require the cooperation of multiple stakeholders/decision makers and are deployed within the confines of a âclosed loopâ environment. Certainly, contactless payment and other commerce applications represent a tremendous opportunity for NFC; however, in most regions, VDC expects that these applications will remain challenged by barriers related to stakeholder cooperation and the availability of contactless infrastructure.