NFC, the buzzword everywhere, but what is the hype all about!!

NFC, short for Near Field Communication is a short-range wireless RFID technology that makes use of interacting electromagnetic radio fields instead of typical direct radio transmissions used by technologies such as Bluetooth. It is being predicted that gradually this technology will transform our mobile phones into a wallet loaded with payment cards from multiple sources including credit cards, health cards, loyalty cards and many more. As compared to its prior technologies such as RFID and Bluetooth, NFC is considered to be more intuitive, versatile and security ready, both with respect to technology as well as standards.

The NFC Ecosystem – Key Stakeholders

The kind of stakeholders involved in successful adoption of NFC are disparate & have to ideally come together to make this dream a reality. The diagram represents key stakeholders for successful implementation of NFC:

 

Some of the key challenges worth mentioning here include: consumer adoption, merchant adoption, standardization, and interoperability and last but not the least, the evolving business models such that the players/stakeholders are working with and not against one another.

The year 2011 was indeed pivotal for advancements in NFC. We saw the launch of Google wallet, the commitment of handset manufacturers and credit card companies behind ISIS and the cooperation of NFC reader manufacturers like VeriFone, which started building NFC into all of its new payment terminals. Payment gateway players such as Visa are also getting involved & taking the lead to explore NFC. Though currently there are only two cards that are NFC enabled, Citibank Master Card and a prepaid card issued by Google, but others are expected to follow soon.

NFC beyond Mobile Payments

NFC is way beyond mobile Payments. The general association of NFC with mobile payments is perhaps due to the fact that solutions from large players such as Google, Verizon came with solutions primarily focused around financial payments. This is however now true. NFC is way beyond Mobile Payments and has business opportunities across verticals, industries & domains. Some of the popular use cases could be:

-     In healthcare wherein the users have a health card which enables storing information about the patient’s health, billing & payment of insurance premium and many more use cases; 

-        In retail with smart shopping card;

-        Features such as exchanging personal information, virtual fingerprinting strengthening security

-        Mobile marketing; and many more

Challenges for NFC in 2012

The key challenges which we foresee for NFC in the year 2012 are:

1.     Lack of clarity to consumer

The consumers are still lost and confused about the complete concept. For NFC to be successful a comfort level needs to be created for the consumers and they have to be convinced about security of contact less payments via NFC. Also there are variety of devices enabled with NFC technology with no standards to set interoperability across devices & merchant kiosks. This will pose as the biggest challenge and the ecosystem will have to derive standards to see NFC in the year of 2012. The biggest concern currently is “All Wallets may not work on all Devices, all Networks & all Merchants”!!

2.     Market Battles

The market battle is ON! Mobile Platform’s are competing to leverage the first mover advantage, while service providers & merchants are competing to jump a leap ahead of their competitors.

3.     Merchant’s Dilemma

Merchant’s dilemma is “Which Wallet to Support”! Also they will need to make a huge investment in terms of upgrading their POS systems & kiosks to enable leveraging full capability of NFC technology.

4.     Profit Issue

Who is making the money, is the billion dollar question? Every stakeholder is trying to leverage as much as possible and be on the winning end. The point all the stakeholder’s are missing is, we all need to work with and not against one another to make this a win-win situation for all of us.

Future of NFC

We predict the future of NFC in years to come is extremely promising. This will however depend on how the relationship between stakeholders of NFC ecosystem evolves but all said and done, the key players involved will use all possible carrot-and-stick approaches to convince merchants to adopt NFC.

 

Irrespective of the challenges NFC will face, the industry will evolve with new standards to embed NFC chips into SD or Micro SD cards. We expect new type of NFC tags to store more data, NFC enabled SIM cards and SIM based NFC payment solution.

Endeavour recently hosted a Webinar on “Insider’s Insight into NFC” which provided much more details about NFC, its future & trends. The recording of the same is available here:

 

Also Read our previous post

NFC based applications making everyday life easier

Mobile weds Cloud - The perfect marriage?

Everyone in technology world is talking about Cloud & it’s perfect marriage with Mobile. Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement and is surely having an enormous impact across industries, changing the way we access and store data. But it holds special promise for smart phones & tablets, which serve as the gateway to our most important content.

The wants of Consumers, Enterprises, and Application Enablers!!

Today consumers & enterprises are looking for information to be available anytime, anywhere and without any restrictions on the devices being used. In such a scenario it was not the “Need being the mother of invention” but “Need being the motivation behind the marriage between Mobile & Cloud”.

From consumer’s perspective, they would like the ability to store and access unlimited media irrespective of the device limitations. Enterprises want to enable wide range of IT functions to enhance employee productivity and to keep them connected across regions thereby enabling seamless sharing of information, delivering services & effective collaboration. With regards to service providers & application enablers, they would want to build apps which are platform agnostic and which can be supported on multiple devices.

Lot of enterprises are moving on to hosted solutions over “The Cloud” and are deriving significant cost advantages. A typical example of such offering is “Enterprise mobile cloud device management tool”. The solutions assists the IT teams at large enterprises in remotely managing the mobile devices by setting policies, performing security verifications, creating enterprise level sandboxes as well in securing virtual areas within the device to segregate personal and enterprise data.

This reflects “Mobility + Cloud” is changing the way mobile applications are developed, acquired and used within the enterprise, or utilized by the consumers for accessing enterprise & personal information. Research from Gartner & IDC further support this fact wherein Gartner estimated “Cloud Software as a Service” to be a $9.2 billion market in 2010, set to reach $10.7 billion in 2011. Another analyst firm, IDC, predicted a $72.9 billion cloud services market by 2015, with SaaS offerings composing roughly 75 percent of that amount.

Are the Current Trends Interesting?

Cloud services utilized by enterprises make mobile devices such as Smartphone & tablets more productive with reduced cost, enabling enterprise employees to access data centre resources that previously were only accessible via desktops, laptops and notebooks. Mobile devices with their ubiquitous, non-stop wireless access make cloud-delivered applications, data, and services more relevant and more instantly available anywhere.

App stores have seen a terrific surge in sheer number of the applications available for. Thereby some of the recent app stores such as HiSpace have moved on to the Cloud which makes it easier to seamlessly maintain, access and synchronize the applications across the range of devices owned by the typical user or household: TVs, PCs, phones, tablets, gaming devices, etc. The developer community is also challenged with developing and constantly updating for multiple OSs, and numerous flavours of phones and tablets. The Cloud enables some consolidation of this work stream.

“Leapdrive” is a typical example of the way Cloud Providers are enabling content from the Cloud across various channels. The appication allows the users to remotely access, view, manage and share all their digital content as soon as it is uploaded to user’s cloud storage. All the multimedia – music, photos and videos – are available to the user while they are on the go. The solution supports streaming music and videos, access to photographs, files directly from the cloud space to the mobile device turning your mobile into a bottomless phone with access to “gigabytes” of space!!

Are we missing the iCloud?

Looking at the future, cloud will work its way even deeper into the consumer sphere beginning next year. The launch of iClould by Apple with iOS5 or better known as the iOS 4S , is essentially an admittance to the fact that iTunes/local storage/sync model is not acceptable in todays multiple device/content everywhere/web services world. After Apple’s iCloud, few other manufacturers are also warming up to the cloud storage and services. HTC was the first to kick of the cloud debate and Huawei is taking it a step further. Huawei provides cloud solution with a free storage of 10 GB in its new devices such as Huawei Vision & Mediapad.

Though application developers & service providers are considering the cloud as a much more compelling place to host one's applications with each passing day, Enterprises are evaluating Cloud with regards to few key challenges such as security & lock-in.

A number of open-source projects and products are now attempting to resolve the lock-in problem, but there's still a long way to go. Security, too, is the focus of much talk and a fair amount of activity from industry organizations, but it looks as if it might take a damaging breach to kick-start an industry-wide approach to resolving some core issues.

What lies in the future?

Consumerization of Cloud Services isn’t something that’s coming. It’s something that’s here.

As the mobility experts we foresee that very soon the browser will become “An Appstore” in itself and most of the consumer as well as enterprise applications will directly operate through the cloud. The advancements in network speeds and low cost Cloud Storage options will drive the integration of cloud and mobile applications thereby evolving cloud computing as the key. We’ll have people accessing social media and corporate apps from smart phones and tablets.

The Mobile Cloud will pave the way for the “Internet of Things.”!!

Our “10 Cents” on the prediction for the future of cloud & mobile’s marriage, is that they are going to live through this time of evolution and make it a “perfect” story. 

Endeavour is a specialist Mobility Company, providing strategic consulting and product development for Mobile enabling businesses in the Manufacturing, Media, Print, Healthcare, Consumer solutions, Telecom and Business Intelligence verticals. Endeavour has a strong mobile application development team on all mobile platforms in the market today, including, RIM, Apple, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, micro Linux, Brew. Endeavour is based out of Austin, Texas, Bangalore India and London, UK. 

Mobilizing the enterprise is imperative for businesses

It can’t be denied: Enterprise mobility is truly taking off. Powerful smartphones are becoming omnipresent, as innovations are happening in the tablets space thereby strengthening the foundation for mobile business applications and enterprise mobility. Mobile enterprise is a fertile field for business innovation, competitive growth and profitability. Organizations are considering mobile initiatives to leverage benefits such as:

- Quicker on investment

- Increased employee productivity

- Desire to interact directly with the customer

- More reliance on mobile information workers and tele-workers

2011 presents enterprises with humongous opportunities to address emerging trends in the enterprise mobility and telecommunications market. Key corporate mobility initiatives include supporting more smartphones, tablets, and other connected mobile devices for employees, deploying more mobile applications, and establishing mobility policies.

SAP has rolled out more than 2,500 iPad tablets to their employees, as they believe that iPad is a useful fantastic tool, not a toy. Wireless apps aren’t just about slings hotting birds or drinking virtual beers anymore. Mainstream business tasks from sales and marketing to customer service and consumer research are quickly making their way from desktops to smartphones.

In addition to mobility initiatives, there are emerging technology opportunities for service providers including unified communications (UC), video services, and machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions. Along with growing investment in these priorities, enterprises are increasingly requiring service delivery via as-a-service, cloud-based, and pay-as-you-go pricing and engagement models.

Enterprise going ahead with Mobility curve

People don’t treat Smartphone's the same way they do laptops, but these devices have become every bit as powerful. As an end user they would prefer having enterprise featured phone so that they can do online credit card payment and take advantages of mobile banking. Book movie, hotel & travel tickets while they are waiting at the metro station for the next train to arrive. Monitor their health & send the reports generated by the self health assessment mobile applications for diseases such as diabetes, asthma, and chronic illnesses to their doctors.

This is the consumer facing aspect of Enterprise Mobility, while the scope of Mobility within the Enterprise is humongous. Forrester recently released data showing 78% of information workers either use or want to use smartphones for work. So from a business perspective call of today’s time is the need for making the sales force truly mobile. Endeavour has built an iPad sales force application suite for a fortune 100 organization in the space of surgical equipment development. Through the app a sales person will be able to access any information when making a sale and a customer visit in an online as well as offline mode. App provides critical information such as Marketing Content, Clinical content, Product Specs, Tools & Apps. This solutions help businesses automate tasks such as inventory control, sales processing, and tracking of customer interactions thereby enabling organizations manage customer relationships better.

Understanding the impact of mobile technology on enterprises is compelling several forward-looking companies to internally start deploying mobility technology solutions into their systems across verticals such as Manufacturing, Retail, Healthcare, Education Insurance, Banking and Financial Services.

A famous retail chain in US envisioned delivering a personalized, convenient shopping experience and at the same time reducing administrative cost and increasing employee effectiveness. So they built an Enterprise application system for their store employees. The solution enables store employees to assist customers by giving product demos, enhancing their shopping experience & increasing the sales. Field Force Automation solution in Enterprise mobility has improved a field worker’s productivity by automating the collection and validation of field data and enhancing customer service. The sales representatives are mobile empowered to access CRM system to document sales call details, process customer contact information and verify distribution of product samples, all in real time. Even IT department can benefit from greater mobile efficiency. Giving systems and database administrators the ability to remote monitor performance from any location on the systems and services they are accountable for ensures increase in their efficiency & productivity.

mHealth is a very hot domain and we see with a tablet, a physician can look up patient medical records while making rounds, improving quality of care. Being a key player in enabling mobility in healthcare domain, Endeavour mobile enabled the EMR- EHR-Practice Management Software. The application developed for one of the client helps the physician, Nurses or Physician’s aid to view the patient details, past visit records, health summary and also would help to manage medication refills and orders.  App is so strong enough that it can assist in Managing Patient Schedules, Demographics and Maintain Patient Health Summary & Visit Notes. The app gives quick access to Lab Results, refill requests, facilitate internal Messaging, complete Audit trails & generates the needed reports and Dashboards.

A self-service human resource portal with mobile accessibility could reduce administration time and improve job satisfaction for employees. Clarity PPM Smartphone Application is one such app which implements the Timesheet module of the Clarity PPM’s enterprise project and portfolio management solution on the mobile devices. The solution simplifies workflow and enhances the productivity by bringing the concomitant benefits of location independence. The mobility solution helps user to access the timesheet module on the mobile device and to use the functionalities such as update, save and submit for approval. This mobility solution enables the top management and the users to save time in filling the timesheet and approving the same even while they are on the move.

Leading Business Analytics Software and Service Provider's have a challenge of getting access to uninterrupted business information & statistics to keep business goals updated. Endeavour’s Mobile Dashboard Application solution provides them with dashboards which help in knowing the pulse of the organization’s performance. Dashboards are created and maintained through an easy-to-use Web-based interface. All content is displayed in a role-based, secure, customizable, and extensible environment. The mobile client available on Blackberry & Windows Mobile has unique features such as app cache management, auto update and remote wipe off, search, alerts, support to multiple languages & access anytime any where capabilities. The application provides view to key performance and indicators assisting managers to make optimal on-the-spot decisions and provide leadership when away from the office.

The Inventory & Aviation industry is also heavily influenced by mobile technology. iPhone application Mobile Inventory Management  helps traders to monitor customer demands and can determine immediately whether the broken valve on the production line is in stock. With RFID tags on the spare parts allow inventory managers with GPS-enabled smartphone to not only verify availability but also determine exactly where (closet, shelf and bin) the goods needed are located in the warehouse. In United Airlines pilots carry iPads which have replaced hefty flight manuals and chart books. With iPad, they are able to quickly and efficiently access reference material without having to thumb through thousands of sheets of paper and reduce clutter on the flight deck.

These successful enterprise mobility case studies confirm the saying that, “the less connected you are to a certain place called work; the better is your productivity.” That’s not conventional thinking but that is becoming the truth as more and more people go mobile and more and more devices are equipped for mobile connectivity. We are seeing an amazing invention of Virtual smartphone Platform which moves smartphone data to the enterprise Cloud by creating a clone of all of the data and applications on the phone. The platform gives IT and end users real-time intelligence and control over smartphone content, activity and applications. Read more about this and many such innovations happening in Mobile cloud computing space in our next blog post.

 Endeavour is a specialist Mobility Company, providing strategic consulting and product development for Mobile enabling businesses in the Manufacturing, Media, Print, Healthcare, Consumer solutions, Telecom and Business Intelligence verticals. Endeavour has a strong mobile application development team on all mobile platforms in the market today, including, RIM, Apple, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, micro Linux, Brew. Endeavour is based out of Austin, Texas, Bangalore India and London, UK.