Found this fun project on Kickstarter, shows the interest in NFC with meeting its fund raising goal in 3 days. John McLear was looking for 30,000GBP and is at nearly 90,000GBP at the time of writing! 

From their site we saw "The NFC Ring can be used to unlock doors, mobile phones and to transfer information and link people." AND it is open source. Of course you can do all the above with any NFC tag bought right here, but it is good fun to see how these clever folks are putting into an every day use. 

Keep in touch with the project, you might even want to support it. Good luck NFC Ring! Go you good thing. 

'Sony Xperia’s Twitter account has published two teaser images along with the hashtag #MAE13, which is the official hashtag for the Mobile Asia Expo taking place in Shanghai next week.

The first message says “1 in 3 smartphone users want smart wrist wear” while the second message simply says “tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock” along with an image of the Sony Smartwatch.'

Rumored to have NFC on board, how would you use an NFC Smart Watch?

From Ubergizmo, great blog for latest tech; check out the full article here.

This has to be one of the first three questions we get asked all day every day. Simple answer in Australia is 9 out of the top 10 phones sold in Australia today have NFC on board. Obviously all except the iPhone.

If you want a more detailed answer the most current list we have found is this one here from NFCworld.com: List of NFC enabled phones.

And another more readily scanned list is the one on Wikipedia, not as current, but easier to scan quickly to see if your handset: Check it out here.

Happy hunting for the right handset for your project, and be sure to confirm which versions of the NFC Forum Tag Types are best to work with. Not all of them play with all hardware.

If in doubt, don't be shy and ask!

Berg Insight predicts this will continue to grow at nearly 50% per annum to reach 1 billion units by 2017.

Global sales of handsets featuring NFC, the technology required to make contact-less payments, grew 300 per cent in 2012 to reach 140 million units, market research firm Berg Insight has found.

Wider adoption of NFC in mobile phones began in 2011 and accelerated in 2012 when the top-ten handset vendors released nearly 100 NFC-enabled models.

We hope your plans to use NFC in your business are coming together and to read the full article you can find it here.

If you haven't seen this report it is will worth a read. It gives a great summary on NFC technology, perfect to broaden your understanding, get some ideas and build your business case for use within your own business.

The report gives a range of uses of NFC including "loyalty cards stored on mobile phones, electronic locks, accessing advertising and marketing information and sharing social information by holding or ‘bumping’ two phones together." It also adds that payments are 5 to 10 years, something we concur with, hence our focus with our clients on what to do with 20% of users at end of 2013 with an NFC-enabled phone. The opportunities to delight customers and improve processes are endless.

NFC Wireless is a proud NSW based business and as we are catering to early adopters and developers of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology we get written up all the time by different media at conferences and trade shows.

Recently Isaac Leung from Electronics News had a sit down with Patrick Crooks, our Strategy and Consulting Manager. Read on to see why we believe 2013 will be the year of change.

NFC Wireless are NFC pioneers, having opened Australia's first online NFC store in early 2012. Supplying quality NFC tags is paramount at NFC Wireless. We are proud partners of Smartrac Technology - world leaders in NFC technology.

EFTPOS Australia is partnering with C-SAM to to set up trials with 10 Aussie retailers to offer payments via NFC-enabled mobile phones soon. C-SAM will offer a white labelled product and wallet to allow broad adoption over the EFTPOS network in Australia within 3 years. Could be a game changer and yet another sign that handset adoption is behind us and time to get solutions ready to go.

According to Strategy Analytics' blog most new LTE (long term evolution) 4G handsets will have NFC installed in 2013. The technology is now supported as a default inclusion in top end Samsung, Blackberry, Google, Microsoft, Motorola, HTC to name a few.

9 out of 10 top selling handsets in Australia now include NFC, and given sales growth rates of Android devices, the projected doubling of NFC-enabled devices in this report would seem assured.

Brick and mortar retailers are not waiting for mobile payments and are leveraging mobile solutions already in the market, such as mobile advertising, couponing, loyalty cards and alternative payments, to drive footfall in stores, and convert that footfall into revenues. We can help you use NFC today to achieve all of the above. Get in touch now with our sales team to find out how we can help you: sales@nfcwireless.com.au

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. has introduced three separate mobile printing solutions that will make it possible to print from mobile devices with only a few simple taps. Available on the GALAXY S4, these mobile printing solutions consist of a mobile printing app for both smartphones and tablets, a built-in “Print” command in the mobile operating system, as well as the integration of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology in several new Samsung printers.

SMARTRAC N.V., the leading developer, manufacturer, and supplier of RFID transponders and inlays, today announced Albury-based NFCWireless.com.au as the winner of its global NFCtags.com partner competition.

NFCWireless.com.au has been awarded first place in a global NFC product design competition due to the ease of use of its Tagster Hotdots and Tagster.it app, which allows anyone with an NFC phone to customize NFC tags to perform complex tasks regardless of design or technology skills. It thereby embodies the vision of NFC.

NFC Wireless' parent company Commerce In Motion has been busy this year sponsoring entrepreneurs in NFC exploration through the UTS U-Lab course in Entrepreneurship for 2012. 

iOS has been the obvious answer to this mundane and obvious question for many years. But as of this year, not anymore. According to recent Telsyte research Andoid now deliver 44% of Australian smart phone operating systems, to Apples' 43%. Given Australia's long held love affair with Apple's iPhone, this is a milestone of some note.

The drivers for this are given as lower cost devices, more choice in devices and responsive design across platforms (you don't have to build and maintain multiple versions). With Apple releasing one phone per annum and the need to now respond to smaller tablets entering the market, it will be interesting to see these same figures in a year's time.

A lot of clients ask us why NFC over QR or what situations to use each in. Here are the basics:

QR offers a link and has no production cost if being placed into printed media. At high resolution it reads well with most cameras if printed on a flat, non-reflective surface.

NFC offers over 20 additional interactions (and growing) to turn on phone functions, set preferences, launch apps, pass through data to third parties to 'order' things. It can do this because it allows data to be written and read from the tag, can be encrypted and can be used in or on almost any material or product.