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Annual sales of counterfeit goods total a staggering $1.7 trillion worldwide impacting confidence and product sales. collectID’s solution to this problem is to combine blockchain with NFC technology to create a complete product authentication ecosystem allowing every user to easily authenticate and trade any product by simply tapping the smartphone on the item. The Switzerland-based company provides products a unique identity based on its characteristics (e.g., watches) or a collectID NFC chip embedded into the product (e.g., sneaker). The unique identity of a product gets connected to a token that is safely stored on the blockchain forever.

New, exciting and innovative products using NFC can be found everywhere around the globe. We collect some of the best examples and display them on the NFC Forum Product Showcase. If you haven’t visited the NFC Forum Product Showcase page in a while – or ever – we encourage you to check it out and see some of the really cool ways NFC is being used in a wide variety of products and solutions.

What’s more important? Setting a goal to strive after? Or achieving the goal? You can’t have one without the other for sure, but PragmatIC CEO Scott White might respond to the above question by saying “Both”.

If you haven’t set up the digital wallet, now is the perfect time to get comfortable with this standard feature on your smartphone. Using a digital wallet lets you purchase goods and services with just a tap of your smartphone at checkout. This is called contactless payment. And, as the name implies, using contactless payment allows you to avoid touching cash and keypads during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Called “Tap and Pay” it reduces transmission of the virus and is the safer way to make payments for both the retailer and the consumer.

QR codes – a visual barcode that needs to be scanned with a mobile phone’s camera -- are currently used quite a bit in Asia. Other regions of the world where smartphones are more prevalent, near field communications (NFC) appears to be the technology of choice for payment and other uses. In fact, NFC technology is the standard enabler for tap-to-pay worldwide.

Most of the top ten smartphones in the world last year by sales are NFC-enabled according to a recent study. This uptick in NFC functionality in smartphones seems to be tracking to some degree an increase in NFC Forum certifications as well. There has already been almost 30 NFC Forum certifications through the first two months of 2020.

Over the last 15 years the NFC Forum has laid the foundation for one of the most successful technologies in use today. It is a standard feature on smartphones and is involved in the daily lives of billions of people. Over 20% of the world’s population has access to NFC technology. It is the interface between humans and the digital world acting as the “great enabler” pairing and connecting devices and solutions for people.

It is truly an honor and pleasure to have such an outstanding slate of judges for the 2020 NFC Innovation Awards. The NFC Forum is grateful for the support and amazed at the level of expertise these judges bring to the effort. It is arguably a “Top Ten” list of the most influential people in NFC technology today – but we prefer to call them the “Terrific Ten”. This group will be responsible for deciding the NFC Innovation Award Winners in five categories. For more information or to enter for free: https://nfcforum.secure-platform.com/a/.

NFC-enabled mobile wallets will top $1 trillion in transactions this year according to data gathered by Learnbonds.com. Predictions call for mobile wallet transaction value to double in only three years with the number of mobile wallet users jumping to one billion in 2020.