The buzz about near field communication (NFC) technology has been steadily building for some time now, as more and more devices become NFC-enabled, and new services making use of the technology, like Visa's payWave, become available.
Yet for all the hype about NFC being the future of...well, everything, there have been few real world uses of the technology developed thus far, and adoption of the ones which have been has been low. This is likely due to the fact that people aren't eager to test out new technology by jumping right into the fire with payment services like payWave or Google Wallet.
Samsung may have an answer to this, one that could serve the dual purpose of being useful services in and of themselves, while also raising public awareness and acceptance of NFC, with the end goal being a much greater adoption of NFC for the purposes of mobile payments. Samsung would love to position themselves to take a huge share of the NFC mobile payment pie, a pie which Juniper Research estimated a year ago could be worth $50 billion by 2014 (though that estimate has proven to be a stretch in the year since).
Samsung hopes to accomplish this through TecTiles, a programmable sticker that uses NFC to allow your mobile device to communicate with the sticker and perform the task it was programmed to perform. Those tasks can vary wildly, and there are a multitude of possibilities when it comes to these new TecTiles.
You could program one sticker to turn on your car's Bluetooth radio with a touch, while another could be set to leave a message for anyone who stumbles upon your sticker. Each sticker can be programmed thousands of times, so you can test out different functions and settle on the ones that seem the most useful.
Currently, each sticker can only handle one task at a time, though plans are in motion to expand on this in the future. Programming and managing the TecTiles will be accomplished through an app which can be downloaded to your mobile device from Google Play. TecTiles stickers come in packages of 5, and will retail for $15 upon their release.
