I’ve seen a number of posts about Near Field Communication (NFC) lately. If your unfamiliar the always helpful Ars Technica has this primer.

 

At the Innogive mobile conference this past summer, Nick Nayfack of Mobile Cause suggested we were years away from this becoming a reality. Why? Retailers don’t want to update their entire point of sale systems to support an emerging standard that might change and that people may not adopt. How many stories have RFID card readers that never get used?

 

This sounds sensible for me. Take Walmart they have 3,609 “regular” and “Supersized” stores in the United States. If each store has 15 registers (an under estimate) that’s more than 50,000 individual machines that need upgraded – a huge capital investment.