When it comes to enabling retailers to conduct transaction using near field communication (NFC) based technology, ViVOtech is a company that’s always being brought up by analysts and the media. According to Bloomberg, roughly 8 out of 10 NFC scanners deployed in the United States are made by ViVOtech. It shouldn’t surprise you then to hear that Google opted to work with them for their Google Wallet rollout later this year. But that announcement is now ancient news, let’s talk about what’s going on right now: Mohammad Khan, President and Founder of ViVOtech, during the 2011 GSMA Mobile Money Summit that “between 30 and 70 million NFC phones will be released into the market this year” and that 1.5 billion NFC enabled handsets will ship in the year 2015, or roughly 1 out of every 4 mobile phones sold during that year. The good news doesn’t stop there, the company has also just announced that they’ve scored $24 million worth of funding, their third round, bringing the total amount of cash thrown at them up to $94 million. Rumor has it that they’ll IPO, meaning they’ll become a publicly traded company, at some point in mid 2012.
Now color us skeptical, but we’re still waiting for NFC to ship on more devices before we get enthusiastic about the technology. Right now there’s the Nexus S and … that’s it. The Sasmung Galaxy S II will have NFC in a version to be released later this year. The same can be said about RIM, who will have an NFC BlackBerry at some point between now and Christmas. The recent leak of the budget Huawei Sonic has us excited at the possibility of a flood of NFC devices hitting the market in Q3/Q4, but until that flood actually materializes we’ll continue doubting what companies and analysts say about the future.
If you ask us, people aren’t going to take NFC seriously until Apple shoves it inside their products, and we don’t think that’s going to happen until the latter half of 2012.