Cuo Bono ?

NFC is still a geek thing , when it should definitely be triggering the imagination of thousands service companies and other small businesses: hotels, real estate companies, airlines, classified ads companies, rental companies, social networks , etc. It is a user thing! Not a geek thing! It is technology made transparent, peer-to-peer, a link between the Internet and reality, etc.

The situation is actually like that: no NFC market = no NFC phones . But the problem today is that: no NFC phones = no NFC market. So we are trapped in a chicken & egg situation. So the geeks are pushing the NFC technology, doing trials to show that NFC technically works, etc., but the Bottom-Up approach has reached its deadlock: the NFC phone.

The chicken & egg situation also exists for a Top-Down approach. Airlines, retailers, advertisers, hotel chains, game publishers, social networks, etc. do not see NFC phones available . As a consequence, when entrepreneurs pitch their great ideas for NFC services, they just don’t see it because they cannot see that this technology is a “user” thing, that the potential is just huge for them! They think: no NFC phones = no NFC market. And this is a real problem for the whole ecosystem to move on. NFC startups are stuck because there are no NFC phones on the market. Creativity and imagination are left dry.

So the deadlock is the availability of NFC phones … Which actually depends on the good will of handset makers (the Tier-1s, who can spend money on R&D) to develop and commercialize NFC phones. Among these handset makers is Nokia (40% market share globally) , which are working on their 3rd generation of NFC phones ( 3220 NFC > 6131 NFC > 6212 NFC ). But they keep delaying the launch of the phone, they are playing hard-to-get for engineering samples, and they are proposing a version that the market does not really want (the market (MNOs) wants a SIM centric NFC phone).

So, if we lay everything on the table, what do we have?
- Bottom-Up approach stopped by availability of
NCF phones;
- Top-Down approached stopped by the availability of NFC phones;
- Tier-1 handset manufacturers (e.g. Nokia) reluctant to release NFC phones in a timely manner, and with the good features.

So the question we could legitimately ask is: Are Handset manufacturers voluntarily slowing down the NFC market to better prepare to propose NFC services ? Nokia for example is definitely switching its business model to providing services . Maybe they see in NFC the next big thing for them, and they want to make sure they’ll get a big chunk of it. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? Or maybe I am just being too imaginative…