Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, said in a recent interview on stage at Web 2.0 Summit that NFC technology will see 500 startups working with it in the coming years. While doing so, he gave a strong hint that Google will be very interested in the findings of this space. NFC, or near field communication, is a short range wireless communication technology that enables the exchange of data between objects at around 10 cm in distance. While it seems this is new technology, now that Google has begun to talk about it openly as well as RIMM, it has actually been around for quite a while. Nokia has been testing out with this technology for quite some time, but all big companies to date still lack any high scale consumer applications for the technology.

Now that the technology in general around NFC has become more common, it is bound to see a lot of startups working in the space in the coming years. Many solutions are linked to commerce, payments more specifically. Eric Schmidt openly states in the video below that ultimately he sees mobile phones replacing credit cards once technology like NFC becomes common and cheaply available for 3rd parties to adopt.

So take it as some free advice - if you're thinking of starting up a company in the mobile space, make NFC a core part of it. You can learn more from Eric Schmidt's thoughts in the video below. The first 10 minutes of the video are related to mobiles and NFC.

Image by akaalias

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finn_will November 27, 2010

There are a bunch of startups here working in this area already, a few below.

Agil Eight
LogiNets
Max Tecnologies
Red Solution Finland
Reslink Solutions
TopTunniste
Upcode Solutions
Venyon
Whileonthemove
Widsen

I am sure there are others, plus a lot of dead ones that were working on this circa-2005.

Will catalyze growth in mobile segments, and lots of services, but hard to design a business around it - more like one element of a robust mobile experience.