As the world is moving towards the Internet of Things there is lot of emerging technologies that are being used to empower the internet of things. First there were barcodes followed by QR Codes, Then RFID tags and now NFC Tags. NFC (Near Field Communication) as the name suggest is about communication at close spaces (working in the ranges between 4cm. and 20cm. ) For a successful communication to take place there needs to be two devices at proximity of which one is a ' Reader ' and the other is a ' tag ' . One is used to store the data while the other reads the data. Nowadays mobile phones have capability to act as "reader" for NFC and in some cases also acts as Tags. After the initial handshake between two devices there is a protocol by which encoding of data happens and transfer of communication takes place.

Coming to the commercial applications of this technology , there are various fields where NFC can be put to use. It can be widely used to power applications on contact less payments in mobile commerce, by this way the mobile phone acts as a digital wallet. ( http://www.infochoice.com.au/banking/credit-card/news/tap-and-go-or-wave-and-pay/38532/2/18 ) . No longer do you need to carry a wallet or your credit card for doing transactions on the Super market. All you need to do is wave and pay using your NFC enabled mobile phones.

Similarly it is used to gather information from various products say a Mobile Phone can be used to extract information from a "smart poster" . Recently the transport department of the Singapore government has launched a lot of Smart posters that facilitate commuters to avail train timings and offers from "smart posters" ( http://www.nfcrumors.com/10-19-2011/smrt-deploys-nfc-smartposters/ ) . Another fun application of this technology would be a "peer to peer data transfer " to facilitate digital exchange of business cards while networking.

In the domain of Healthcare there is a lot of research going on to power healthcare personal devices to exchange information with mobile apps and digital dashboards using NFC technology. Care givers are planning to use mobile NFC enabled devices to collect information from personal health devices on vital signs of the patient. There are far reaching development happening in this domain to address NFC capability across the network.

RFID usually complies to with ECMA and AES standards to address data security and data communication. NFC has standards similar to RFID that get addressed at different levels. A typical transaction will have a "Active" device that acts as a reader and there will be a "passive" device that will act as a "tag" . At a given time data transfer is in one single direction only thereby ensuring that data loss can be minimized.