What is the Killer App for Mobile NFC?

With half a billion NFC-enabled handsets equipped with NFC tap and go technology expected to hit the market in the next year, industry experts at the NFC Solutions Summit agreed that the major first step to broad NFC adoption has been accomplished. But discussion and debate continued as to what the killer app will be to get the technology to take off. The NFC Solutions Summit, presented by the Smart Card Alliance in partnership with the NFC Forum, was held this week in Burlingame, Calif.
Applications like wine tracking and device pairing that fulfill unmet needs and simplify activities may be the "world-winning NFC solutions," according to Koichi Tagawa of Sony and chairman of the NFC Forum.  In another example, Tagawa noted that Japanese airlines using NFC can board a 450-person plane in only 15 minutes, as opposed to the standard boarding process for a 150-person plane without NFC in 40 minutes. While speakers and panelists didn't reach consensus on what the so-called "killer app" for NFC will be, speakers conveyed the great potential for NFC including mobile payments in the longer term.  When asked the question "Is NFC dead?" compared to alternate technologies such as cloud payments, Glenbrook Partners Consultant Allen Weinberg stressed that all these technologies are still in the early days and it is too soon to make judgments on what mobile commerce technologies will be the winners and losers. "At the end of the day, we don't have a widespread, commercialized anything yet," he said.
The two-day NFC Solutions Summit is the leading annual NFC conference, featuring leaders from the entire NFC ecosystem. The 2013 conference brought together nearly 400 executives from financial services, payments processing, retail services, technology providers, applications development, and industry analysts in an interactive, instructive forum on the business issues, implementation milestones, and technology advancements happening in NFC markets.
The Smart Card Alliance has developed numerous educational  NFC resources that are available on its website.  Most recently, the Smart Card Alliance Mobile and NFC Council wrapped up a successful webinar series on mobile and NFC security fundamentals.  The series of four webinars, held in partnership with GlobalPlatform and the NFC Forum, aims to provide mobile application developers and the mobile community with the education they need to choose the best level of security for their NFC applications.  The recordings from the webinars are available for free on the  Smart Card Alliance website.