FUTURE TECH
Having shipped over 5 million iPhone 5s in
the last week ‘what would have been definitely will not be for some time
to come'. WHY? Well it’s all down to the
missing NFC chip. Everybody was expecting Apple to include a Near Field
Communications chip in every iPhone5 and because they didn’t two virginal
industries have taken a major hit.
What would an NFC chip do for you?
- It turns you phone into a wallet.
- It turns your phone into a geo location device
The impact on you is that you will not be
able to point your phone at the barman to pay for pints or buy a coffee at
Starbucks. The NFC would have changed your phone into an electronic wallet and
like any other wallet, you store money in it and you take money out to pay for
things. There was a huge financial and technological industry ready to take off
e.g. supplying new terminals to shops, bars, restaurants that could niftily help
themselves to the content of your wallet to pay for goods and services.
Financial services companies would have provided the transaction processing
services and software to calculate how much money everybody gets. This is a fledgling
industry but 2 million potential new users in less than a week would have been
dynamite! It would have created a critical mass that would have left leather
wallets a thing of the past as fast as Blackthorn football boots.
The other industry to take a hit this week
was the powerful advertising industry. They thought that they were going to
know where you were at all times (Geo Locating sometimes also know as
Geo-Fencing) and what you are likely to buy
(history of searches, payments, browsing, even Facebook activity). So
for example when you walk through Dublin airport on your way to a holistic week
in Ibiza, your phone would start buzzing like an excited monkey suggesting you purchase
your favourite eau de toilette or a new alternative in the duty free shop, pick
up a copy of the new Michael Connolly novel for the beach and a new pair of sunglasses
on special offer in the hut. “Wow” says you “that’s a bit invasive, but how did
it know I was not going on a skiing holiday”?
Because your boarding pass was stored on your phone silly, thanks to the
NFC.
Can you imagine the amount of marketing
plans, advertising strategies and corporate presentations that have been dumped
in the waste paper bin in the last week?
10s of millions of dollars will now have to be redirected in marketing
budgets and for some high tech geo locating software companies it will be a
blow too far, at best they will have to limp back to their venture capital
buddies.
The impact of the lack of an NFC in the
iPhone on the ‘wallet’ has been the main talking point over the last two weeks.
But the financial industry is strong and robust. In fact, as we know, Governments
won’t allow them to fail. The biggest hit has been to the fledgling geo location
software and advertising industry. It maybe that first movers are annihilated
and what comes next, in a few more years, will be tempered and limp. Some analysts are predicting that Apple will sell over 70 million iPhone 5s by the end of the year. That's a lot of missing NFC's and lost opportunity.
Maybe a good result for the rest of us!
peter@worldofelectronics.ie
peter@worldofelectronics.ie
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