Mobile NFC Services: Adoption Factors and a Typology of Business Models

The integration of Near Field Communication (NFC) into mobile devices has recently emerged as a disruptive innovation and a strong enabler of a wide range of new mobile applications and services. Yet, despite this great potential, the widespread adoption of mobile NFC services remains restrained. This chapter investigates the success factors that are contributing towards the proliferation of mobile NFC services. It also presents an in-depth analysis of the key hurdles standing in the way of full NFC commercialization, with the caveat that disagreement about the proper business model among the key ecosystem players is currently the major adoption restraint. The chapter articulates the vision of a cooperative model that can enable the sharing of services, infrastructure, cost, and revenues among various NFC ecosystem players. The author also adopts a four-tier classification approach to categorize NFC business models into a number of typologies. Some recommendations for future research are also provided. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1981-4.ch016