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NFC to extend Android acceptance: Schmidt
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 16 November 2010, 21:15 IST
San Francisco: Google CEO Eric Schmidt during the Web 2.0 Summit announced that Google is getting into Near Field Communications (NFC). He also had an actual phone, with the brand well hidden. The company's upcoming version of Android will contain an NFC chip, and some special sauce in Gingerbread, it is due in just a few weeks. By using NFC in a phone, users can theoretically just "tap and pay". This requires an ecosystem of merchants, payment providers and payment processors, and while this ecosystem is starting to form, it's still evolving.
Schmidt later told a gathering of reporters that broader acceptance is probably a year away. Beyond raw commerce transactions, NFC can also enable the mobility of other private information- say for use by healthcare providers or for making offers to mobile consumers and so on.
Schmidt said that this chip is already being used in thousands of places, including on many credit cards, and at merchants around the world. He later told reporters that the technology provides a higher level of authentication and identification than the magnetic stripe, which makes it very attractive to credit card companies for reducing fraud.