Highlights from this Summer’s NFC Open Forum

The virtual event showcased strong statistics, interesting use cases, and multiple award winners.

The NFC Forum completed their NFC Open Forum recently. The educational event was a great success, with over 50 attendees, and multiple presentations highlighting the state of NFC technology.

Promising Statistics

The NFC Open Forum began with an introduction by newly elected NFC Forum Chair, Preeti Ohri Khemani, who is also the Director of System Engineering at Infineon Technologies. Khemani explained the importance of fostering continued NFC research, highlighted by a few statistics that demonstrate NFC’s success:

• There are 2.87 billion smartphones in the world with NFC technology.
• Approximately 64 new devices with NFC technology installed are produced every second.
• 20% of the world’s population uses NFC in their daily lives.

Innovative Use Cases and Projects

The Open Forum then transitioned into highlighting innovative and prominent use cases that NFC Forum members and non-members have recently developed. The following presentations were given to the virtual audience:

• Innovative NFC Use Cases – Dr. John Rogers, Northwestern University
• Commons Project – Paul Meyer, The Commons Project Foundation
• Spoken Rx – Joseph Spears, CVS Health
• NFC Charging for Enterprise Class Devices: Zebra Case Study – Marek Trusinski, Zebra
• How eBay Achieved a 90% Customer Satisfaction Rate with NFC – Mikhail Damiani, BlueBite

NFC Innovation Award Winners

The Open Forum was also the stage for the unveiling of the 2022 Innovation Award Winners. This year, the category for competition was the “Most Innovative Use of NFC Technology.” The Grand Prize Winners were:

• ASSA ABLOY Global Solutions and HID Global
• Blue Bite brand protection solution for EBay
• Centiloc data-center provisioning
• Control Techniques for inventory management
• Identiv with CVS for Spoken RX™

A full press release including more details on the NFC Forum 2022 Innovation Award Winners can be found here.

NFC Forum Executive Director Mike McCamon concluded the Open Forum by providing an update on the NFC Forum including the release of the NFC Forum’s new website.

To attend NFC Forum member-exclusive events or to attend the next NFC Forum Open Forum, inquire about membership registration requirements here.