China Unicom, together with the city of Chongqing, have a goal of transforming the region into an NFC powerhouse that makes revenues upwards of $7 billion per year by the year 2015. Investments will be made in infrastructure, and tax breaks will be given to component suppliers in an attempt to draw them to the area.
The goal is for China Unicom to create a Near Field Communication Industry Alliance that will bring together everyone in the ecosystem together and create a joint R&D lab that will put China ahead of other countries when it comes to NFC adoption.
China Mobile, another wireless operator, recently purchased 20% of Shanghai Pudong Development Bank in order to become a key player in the wireless payment space. They’ve been experimenting with NFC SIM cards, which are exactly what they sound like, a SIM card that also has a wireless near field chip inside.
China Unicom on the other hand wants to adopt the standards that have been passed in the west and will go with SWP, or single wire protocol, which turns 2 years old this December, but has yet to be launched en masse. NFC was supposed to be a major selling point of Nokia’s soon to launch Symbian^3 operating system, but delays have pushed that feature into the next version, Symbian^4. Speaking about Nokia and NFC, Anssi Vanjoki said that the company is going to start building devices utilizing the technology starting next year.
As for America, we’re still waiting to hear about “Project Mercury”, the combined effort of AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Discover and Barclays at bringing about mobile payments in a standards based way to the country starting late this year or early next year. NFC promises to change a lot of things and I wouldn’t be surprised if the next iPhone had the feature built in. Apple has enough NFC patents that they must be dying to get the technology off the ground. Then again I’ve been writing about near field since I started blogging back in November 2006.
It’s still a dream.