Near Field Communications (NFC) is an intuitive technology that provides an instinctive experience when it interacts with other products that are NFC-enabled. If you like, it's the magic wand of wireless technologies: a simple swish of your NFC-enabled device can gain you access to buildings, cinemas, and subways, and another swish or two can allow you to make a payment and even to simplify connectivity with other wireless technologies. We'll be discussing these very real user scenarios and much more later, in Section 12.2, “NFC's Market,” and Section 12.3, “NFC's Application Portfolio.”

NFC is an open standards-based, short-range technology that has its origins firmly based in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology; in this chapter, we discuss NFC's inception and evolution. You may recall from Chapter 1, “It's a Small Wireless World,” that we discussed the nineteenth-century wireless secret and revealed how RFID technology was used during World War II as a means of identifying aircraft; we illustrate in Figure 12.1 how pilots would roll their planes to enable the ground forces to identify them as friend or foe. In this chapter, we'll also explore the NFC Forum, its membership benefits, and its structure. The chapter discusses the market scope, whereby initial NFC-enabled products have started to emerge in greater numbers due to the uptake of the technology in smart or cellular phones. We will, of course, look at how NFC fares against other technologies within the same market sector and how the technology has been misunderstood as a competitor to more mainstream wireless technologies such as Bluetooth. Finally, the chapter delves inside NFC and takes a first-hand look at its software architecture and protocol.