One of ‘coming real soon’ technologies of our times is Near Field Communications (NFC), a short range radio service connecting suitably equipped electronic devices.
NFC has been tipped to arrive ‘real soon now’ for several years as mobile phone companies, banks and telcos fight to control the payments system.
The service hasn’t taken off for a number of reasons; it’s clunky to use, the technology itself isn’t consistently applied and many smartphones don’t have the feature, the most notable being the iPhone.
Most of the applications cited for NFC are contactless payment services where a customer can wave a phone to pay for things, a good example is this parking meter in San Francisco.
On the other side of the Pacific, Google are running a campaign in Australia encouraging commuters to try the NFC features that are built into most Android phones.
Unfortunately the technology doesn’t work, as the comments to this blog post indicate. The users’ problems illustrate why NFC is struggling; it’s clunky, unreliable and customers don’t understand it.
It’s notable the Google campaign includes a QR code, another technology that’s been pending for nearly a decade.
Both are doomed though while customers struggle to use them.
We may well see both QR codes and NFC succeed eventually, but right now they are the classic case of a technological solution searching for a problem to solve.