WIMA-NFC 2010

- the WIMA NFC exhibition and conference for NFC and associated technologies held in Monaco between 20 and 22 April 2010.....

The WIMA NFC conference provides an annual conference for the NFC industry. With many applications from contactless payments, ticketing, proximity connectivity for mobile phones and very much more, NFC is a technology for which there is a growing market.

WIMA-NFC 2010 took place at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco against the back drop of the fallout from the volcanic eruption in Iceland. Despite the difficulties the management quickly put in place measures to alleviate the situation: speakers who were unable to reach their destination were linked up via Skype or other video links. As a result the conference was able to proceed, making it worth while for those who did manage to get to their destination.

Joanna Merchie, the WIMA Event Manager commented: "The feedback back has been very positive considering the situation and we made the right decision to go ahead with just under 200 people attending out of the 400 registered prior to the event."

WIMA location

In view of the importance of NFC, the WIMA 2009 conference and forum was held in Monaco. Located on the southern French cost of the Cote d'Azur, the location provided an excellent backdrop for the conference with its Sun, hotels and highlife. Even the Casino was not far away!

However, the conference itself was more down to earth. It provided an excellent showcase for the world of NFC and contactless communications. With WIMA, a member of the NFC forum, the event provided an authoritative view for the latest NFC technology developments along with the latest applications. Now well established, significant opportunities being seen for the use of NFC in many areas and as a result the technology is moving forward and significant progress was seen since last year. This year's event proved to be very successful according to the organisers.

WIMA Conference

The WIMA NFC conference programme had a variety of interesting, providing updates on the way in which NFC is progressing. While to many people, NFC may not appear to have hit the big time yet, it has been successfully been incorporated into a number of areas of everyday life - Oyster cards for travel in London is one example and contactless card payments schemes such as that being rolled out by Visa

Plenary Keynotes during WIMA:

• Suvi Linden, Minister of Communications, Finland - was unable to reach Monaco, but gave his presentation via a video link.
• Brigitte Bourgoin, Chairman, AFSCM ; Executive Vice President, Head of Domestic Wholesale and Partnership for France - France Telecom-Orange
• Dominique Descolas, Project Director & Advisor, Veolia Transport
• Jerome Nadel EVP Marketing & User Experience - Sagem Wireless

WIMA NFC main themes

Although the speakers gave many insights into the way that NFC technology is progressing, some main themes came out of the conference:

• Mobile Contactless Nice:   One of the big items of news that created a lot of discussion at WIMA was the pre-commercial mobile contactless roll out will take place in Nice before the summer 2010. This is being organised by AFSCM, Association Francaise du Sans Contact Mobile, a non profit organization that was created in 2008 by Bouygues Telecom, Orange France and SFR, and now includes many other members including MNOs/MVNOs. The deployment means that for the first time, French mobile operators will market mobile contactless offers (including NFC-enabled mobile handsets) to the 500 000 residents of the Nice metropolitan area. These subscribers will be the first European citizens to access a variety of mobile contactless services, useful in their everyday life - public transportation, payment, loyalty programs, access to relevant information just by touching "cityzi" targets with the NFC phone, etc.. [NB Cityzi^TM is a brand created by the AFSCM
  
  This is just one example of the way in which NFC is moving from technical trials to customer based trials to look at the ways in which NFC can be used.
• Alternative solutions:   With one of the acknowledged problems with NFC being that there are very few NFC enabled phones for example, this could prevent the technology from being adopted. To overcome this, a number of manufacturers are offering interim solutions to provide NFC connectivity. One example of this was the Twinlinx offering that uses an NFC phone back that communicates with the phone itself via Bluetooth. In this way the problem with limited number of NFC phones can be overcome for the short term..
• Security:   One of the big issues with NFC is that offering a way of providing contactless payment, security is a major issue. Already a system in the Netherlands has been compromised, but this has now been overcome.
  
  However allied to this is the fact that for end to end solutions to be developed, the individual elements will need to communicate. With several organisations contributing to typical multifunctional systems, each needing to protect their own security, communication can become difficult. To resolve this methods need to be developed to enable provide both flexible and quick communications while also allowing for the security requirements of each contributing organisation. This was the topic of a presentation by Gil Bernabeu of GlobalPlatform.
• Testing:   With NFC now being deployed in a number areas and likely to achieve far higher levels of deployment, it is necessary to ensure that all products that are released will operate correctly. To this end the NFC Forum has developed an Interoperability test programme called the "First Wave Certification Programme", and they will be releasing their certification mark later this year. Test houses are also gearing up to start this testing in time for new product releases. A second wave certification programme is also planned and the timescale for this is anticipated to be 2011 / 2012.
• Sagem Cosyphone:   While many manufacturers have held back from producing new NFC enabled phones, Sagem Wireless have been demonstrating their Cosyphone - an NFC enabled phone enabled at "more mature people". This phone has larger keys as well as using NFC to provide a variety of easy to use functions.

WIMA Exhibition

While the number of visitors to WIMA was down as a result of the volcanic ash grounding many flights, there were still many manufacturers present. The exhibitor's floor provided a good area to enable discussions to take place outside the presentations. It also enabled the various entries to the WIMA NFC competition to be viewed at first hand.

While this year was obviously a disappointment in many respects, the event was still able to go ahead and provide a useful platform for NFC. As a result, the scene is set for the next WIMA NFC. Said Joanna Merchie: "We are expecting an exciting WIMA 2011 between 19 - 21 April next year in Monaco.