More NFC payment talk

Another article about NFC from the International Herald Tribune.

From the article:

If NFC's backers - which include heavyweights like Sony, Motorola, Nokia, MasterCard and Visa - are successful, people will use their cellphones as electronic wallets to make purchases and to buy tickets on trains and in movie theaters and to receive additional information from billboards and other points.

"This technology has the potential of becoming very widespread," said Lauri Pesonen, who is in charge of NFC consumer solutions at Nokia and is a board member of the NFC Forum, the industry group backing the technology.

The Finnish cellphone maker Nokia already sells a separate shell with an NFC chip that clicks onto one of its regular phones. It is available directly from Nokia, but as soon as the market seems set to take off, Nokia is prepared to start inserting the chip directly into its phones.

"Nokia has always put a lot of effort into the usability of mobile phones," Pesonen said. "This kind of intuitive interaction with the mobile phone ties very well into that."

"New technology like NFC is good and all," said Nils Molin, a Stockholm-based analyst with the research company International Data Corp. "But for it to overcome man's innate resistance, strong user-friendly applications and a real demand have to be in place."