Berg Insight: Berg Insight identifies NFC as key enabler of future mobile services May 20, 2008 – Berg Insight Staff
According to a new research report from the analyst firm
Berg Insight, technologies such as NFC are enabling a completely new segment
of mobile applications - proximity services or local services - but the
industry first needs to settle several critical technical and pedagogic
issues. The market is still guarded and fragmented, but in the long term
consumers will not accept to handle multiple devices, cards, accounts and
passwords.
A long-term pragmatic view and initial cooperation is necessary to enable the
paradigm shift that will morph the mobile phone into a terminal for
communicating with intelligent objects in the environment. “Local
contact-less services are already available to over 50 million mobile users
that can shop, travel and get information by just waving their phones over
readers”, said Sabine Ehlers, associate analyst, Berg Insight.
In Japan for example the service is well-established and a great success in
terms of number of readers installed, service partners linked and subscriber
terminals in use. When it comes to actually applying the technology however,
the mass of consumers apparently need time to change deep-rooted behaviours.
In Europe the development is held back by uncertainty about business models
and the lack of coordination between different players. Especially mobile
operators regard the new business field with caution due to its lack of
obvious revenues for network owners.
Berg Insight does however identify several important contributions from the
operators, and reasons why they cannot afford to stay outside this exciting
new field. The report gives a thorough technical background to the
contact-less mobile field, identifies the best strategies for initial
services and how to progress from there, and discusses experiences from a
large number of trials and services from around the world.
