Through the ever useful, Contactless Intelligence newsletter, I came across a piece of coverage about Nokia’s intention to integrate NFC (Near Field Communication) into more and more of their handsets, including the new N900 – which is coming out very very soon.
Thanks to being chummy with VISA over the past couple of years, I got to play with one of the prototypes of the phone for a good 6 months in 2009. I must say, it didn’t stick immediately but I am convinced that, by 2012 – the user interface will be waaaaay more intuitive and, as that was the biggest roadblock as far as I was concerned, I expect the pick-up will be much greater.
This doesn’t mean it will be a walk in the park for Nokia, it isn’t as if NFC will be considered as big a commodity as SMS was in the 90’s – not by a long shot – but it isn’t anything a healthy publicity campaign wouldn’t solve. The moment a bunch of 20+ year olds see, believe and trust that totting up and settling debts amongst friends can be as quickly solved as a couple of buttons, beeps and a waft of their mobile – the peer-to-peer micro payment will be alive and kicking.
From my perspective, this would have been incredibly helpful over the past few years for exactly that reason. The amount of times I paid for dinner with a friend, or bought something in full that would then need to be broken up amongst a small group of friends, only to find that all they had was cash or a 3 week wait whilst they finally found a moment to log onto the online banking was utterly frustrating.
Equally, instead of using this technology to settle up on shares of a larger debt to one person, a bunch of friends (all with NFC enabled handsets) that need to split a dinner bill of £60 directly to the waiting staff could simply apply a bit of basic mental division, type in their individual totals and send the authorised amount to the waiting staff’s handset/PDQ machine!
On an utterly serious note, I would very much like to see NFC technology adopt a far more consumer friendly title (and verb), “Bamph”. As in…
“Mate, you still owe me £8 from that round last night, I’m away next week so can you just bamph me it now?”
-Or-
“Little Mikey, I’ll bamph you your pocket money… but first give your old Nan a hug!”
See? Sound awesome. Way more colloquial than NFC and one syllable shorter than PayWave!
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