The NFC Forum, a multinational non-profit industry association that promotes the technology and establishes standards within the NFC industry, has announced an update to NFC specifications. The update will allow NFC devices to interact with one another in an active fashion. Current NFC applications rely on an active reader device, such as a smart phone, and a passive device, such as a NFC terminal or mobile wallet. The Forum believes that the update will make the technology much more intuitive than its previous incarnation.
To make use of the Forum’s update, consumers will have to obtain the Simple NDEF Exchange Protocol chip, which is the Forum has made available free of charge. The chip replaces the old NFC chip in a smart phone and transforms the phone into an active NFC device. Two devices that have the chip will be able to transfer data seamlessly without the need for contact. Business information will also be able to be transmitted in such a way, removing the proximity requirements of previous NFC technologies.
Wireless data transfer is quite common these days, thanks to WiFi and Bluetooth, but the Forum believes that NFC is capable of replacing other means of data transfer. Part of the technologies promising future lies in the fact that NFC has a myriad of uses that stretch well beyond data transfer.
