NFC, a short-range wireless technology that can transfer small amounts of data between two devices held at close proximity, will now finally get consumers' attention after a seemingly endless lull, said entrepreneurs.
"Before Apple, NFC was kind of dead. Now the question mark over the technology has disappeared," said Raghavenra Saboo, CEO of Bangalore-based Linqs, which offers a solution to connect physical products to the smartphone via near-field communications.
Other NFC solution providers such as Tagtual Technologies, Nearyou Leading Technologies and mobile payments solution provider iKaaz Software, too, expect Apple's entry to be a game changer for them.
iKaaz, which has a brand-agnostic NFC payments solution that eliminates the need to swipe credit cards and works in both emerging and developed markets, is particularly excited. "iPhone is not really popular here, and our low-cost solution works great. The announcement is well aligned with our retail launch," said Soma Sundaram, founder and CEO at iKaaz Software.
Sundaram, a former Nokia executive, hopes the company will break even in 2017 and reach 3,500 merchants by the end of the next year.
An NFC tag stuck on the back of any smart or feature phone can carry out transactions at a merchant's NFC terminal, just with a tap, instead of a credit card swipe.
The technology has the potential to help your smartphone double up as your wallet and ultimately do away with all kinds of cards — credit cards, debit cards, loyalty cards — and even tickets and car keys.
"For consumers, the biggest advantage is convenience and better user experience," said Jayanth Kolla, co-founder and partner at telecom research firm Convergence Catalyst.
Saboo of Linqs said that ever since Apple announced its move into mobile payments more and more people are visiting his website even though he did a bad job on search engine optimisation. The orders for the tags that Linqs sells on Amazon and Snapdeal have increased 200% in India.
Saboo, 37, now expects Linqs to sell 10,000-50,000 NFC-powered business cards per month by the end of this fiscal. The NFC industry sees Apple as the only brand that has enough clout to change the payment behaviour of consumers, and firms hope Apple Pay will do what Google Wallets has failed to -make NFC technology popular. Google introduced NFC in its Android phones well over three years ago. Even though Nokia, HTC, Samsung and the like forayed into the segment, NFC is yet to take off for lack of awareness and supporting infrastructure that Apple is generally known to bring with any new technology it supports.
In April, rumours that Apple would add NFC to iPhone 6 surfaced, and between April and September, the stock price of NFC chipmaker NXP Semiconductors soared 19% on the NASDAQ. It hit $70 on the day of the iPhone 6 launch.
During the same period, the number of NFC-related queries on Quora, a question and answer website, too increased.
Ajay Dabaria, co-founder of Nearyou Leading Technologies, is looking at $1 million (about Rs 6.1 crore) in revenues in the next two years. "If Apple opens its API to developers, we can build lots of solutions for ticketing, access control, specifically for iPhone users," he said.
Not just startups, veterans in the payment space, too, hailed Apple's entry into the NFC space.
"It might still take some time before it becomes mainstream, but NFC was always part of our roadmap," said Sanjay Swamy, chairman of Bangalore-based Ezetap, which makes a credit-card reader device for merchants. Sharjeel Ahmed, cofounder of Tagtual Technologies — that sells tags, business cards and other NFC-based solutions — said, "Even though I'm not a big fan of Apple, I was waiting for it." Tagtual offers a product to keep track of people moving in and out of large commercial complexes.
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