tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17500930.post6676040861140934649..comments2024-03-20T22:57:03.923+00:00Comments on Dean Bubley's Disruptive Wireless: Plenty of unanswered questions about the O2 NFC Oystercard trialDean Bubleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05719150957239368264noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17500930.post-79611850918442882022008-09-04T07:08:00.000+01:002008-09-04T07:08:00.000+01:00Well, NFC is quite a few things. It is also a rea...Well, NFC is quite a few things. It is also a really simple way to use new and old services by touching them. It also allows phone-to-phone communication (e.g. cashless, immediate person-to-person payments, BT pairing, transferring of pictures, etc).<BR/><BR/>The RFID sticker wouldn't work. The advantage of NFC over regular cards is the fact that you can do all sorts of things with the card now that it is connected to the network - top up, install new credit cards with a phone call, connect to merchant services, etc.<BR/><BR/>The battery-down functionality is required by operators. In the future, the balance will be on your SIM card, so you can switch it from phone to phone. It is separate from the phone CPU, so it does work while in the middle of the call.<BR/><BR/>User benefits? The fact that you can turn off your card or protect it with a PIN code (which you can't with a regular Oyster card), which gives an extra feeling of security. Not that important on public transport - a lot more important on payments. Also, the user gets on-the-go access to his account data. Contactless payment also means that the payment instrument never needs to leave the users hands, and therefore is less susceptible to theft. Also, the entire chain from the user to the CC company will become more secure (which means less losses to the CC company => cheaper transactions to merchants => better availability of contactless CC payment).<BR/><BR/>Not to mention that all the other functionality, like discovering smart posters & P2P are rather hackable (in a good sense), which means that there are plenty of applications out there to be discovered...<BR/><BR/>In Austria, the NFC infra is based completely on the touching-of-tags part. People are paying parking fees, playing lotto, and doing all sorts of other things with NFC as well. UK seems to have chosen to grab Oyster as the first app. It remains to be seen what the real killer app is, but it probably is a different thing for different people.<BR/><BR/>(Yeah, and I agree, the press release is a bit fluffy. But in general, users *do* like NFC - it is rather intuitive for a mobile phone technology. But liking something is not the same thing as finding it so useful that you want to shell out cash for it... I like to go out and stand in the rain, but I wouldn't pay for someone to shower me with a garden hose. ;-)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17500930.post-76231381871752838282008-09-03T16:03:00.000+01:002008-09-03T16:03:00.000+01:00All participants were given free phones (because o...All participants were given free phones (because obviously no operator-subsidised phones in the UK have NFC) and also allegedly 200 pounds in free credit and some other incentives - I say allegedly because I can't track down the source for that any more.<BR/><BR/>That's the sort of thing which could positively influence a survey's results, one might think. <BR/><BR/>The only reason the RFID sticker wouldn't work as well as handset integration is that the handset can, optionally, enable a bunch of secondary functions like balance checks. But if you balance that against the involvement of the operator and their desire to be paid back for that NFC chip subsidy, suddenly a balance check is not so attractive...raddedashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14429544221232115028noreply@blogger.com