On my second day at Mobile World Congress last week, I took a short break from photographing new smartphones and visited the NFC Cafe in one the cavernous exhibition halls at the Fira de Barcelona. All right, I really didn't have lunch, but I took a tour of the various solutions for NFC (near field communications), a technology that uses your mobile device to pay for almost whatever you'd like. In the first (and perhaps the most useful) demonstration, we're using an NFC-enabled Samsung Nexus S to make a payment at a parking meter. Once you touch the handset to a "tag" on the meter, the payment will deduct automatically from the credit or debit card linked to the mobile payment system.
On one wall of the cafe were screens that used NFC to purchase items and download information onto your phone. Here we're using NFC to select a mobile game and transfer it to your handset.
