First this, from TRENDWATCHING.COM Newslet­ter — Global Con­sumer and Mar­ket­ing Trends, Feb­ru­ary 2005:

Amazon.com Japan’s new ‘Scan Search’ enables con­sumers in any real-world store to point their cell phones at a product’s bar­code and then be instantly directed to Amazon.com.jp on their phone screen, where they can view the — no doubt lower priced — item, and have it sent to them straight away. The future? Nokia is already work­ing on a phone that can ‘read’ RFID tags, the lat­ter being the new bar codes.

Then this, from The Near Field Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (NFC) Forum: “Con­sumers are seek­ing eas­ier ways to inter­act with their imme­di­ate envi­ron­ment and to enable easy com­mu­ni­ca­tion between their elec­tronic devices.”

The vision of the NFC Forum is to enable users to access con­tent and ser­vices in an intu­itive way by sim­ply touch­ing smart objects and con­nect­ing devices just by hold­ing them next to each other. To bring this vision to life, the NFC Forum invites all inter­ested par­ties — com­pa­nies from mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions, con­sumer elec­tron­ics, chip man­u­fac­tur­ing, com­put­ing, media and enter­tain­ment, tele­com and pay­ment ser­vices sec­tors — to join the NFC Forum and help fur­ther our goals.

Excit­ing stuff … stay tuned!

Tech­no­rati Tags: Mobile, RFID