IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2013 - 21

SUNGBUM KIM,
TAEYONG YANG,
AND DONGWOOK KIM

LEADING EDGE

Critical Success Factors of Convergency
Technology Commercialization:
Near Field Communication

n recent years, near field communication (NfC)
has generated consumer and industry player
interest. With the recent surge in the popularity
of smartphones and interest in mapping global
standards, NfC is now starting to attract much broader
attention from global players, including mobile network operators, device manufacturers, financial firms,
and NfC chip providers.
An emerging convergence technology in the mobile
communication industry, NfC is a wireless shortdistance communication standard co-invented by Sony
and NXP semiconductors in 2002. Since 2003, however, uncertainty in the business has prevented NfC
from being commercialized [1]. Uncertainty about the
commercialization of convergence technology is due
to a failure to resolve disputes between players and to
meet consumer needs.
In the future, we will witness many convergence
technologies like NfC that have to be worked upon
for a long time before they are commercialized. On
the other hand, we will witness other types of convergence technologies that are commercialized very
quickly. This highlights the need for a feasible analytic framework that can identify success factors of
convergence technology commercialization and methods to accelerate commercialization.
The objective of this article is to understand the
relationships among different concepts and factors
in the NfC commercialization environment and to
determine an efficient expedition process for NfC
commercialization.
first, this article decomposes convergence technology into understandable elements and identifies
technology characteristics that could be used to create
new businesses and accelerate the commercialization
of convergence technology. Second, it analyzes the
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2013.2276668
Date of publication: 26 September 2013

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

fALL 2013

current status and future strategy of players related to
NfC technology as case studies. Last, it derives success factors of NfC commercialization from the technology, provider, and end-user perspectives.
Because NfC is a convergence technology, it has
to be interpreted from the technology perspective.
However, it is also perceived by end users as a service,
and therefore has to be analyzed from the end-user
perspective as well.

NFC Technical Characteristics
Basic Technical Characteristics
NfC is a short-range wireless standard and a type of
radio frequency identification (RfID) technology that
allows data exchange between two devices in close
proximity (10 cm) to each other without contact at a
frequency of 13.56 MHz [2]. RfID consists of a reader
and a tag, where the tag does not have a micro controller unit (MCU) and has only read-only memory
(ROM) [3]. NfC controllers, on the other hand, have
separate MCUs and allow two-way communication.
The technical design of NfC itself is a seed for creating a new business model that goes beyond simple
payments and is changing consumer behavior using
new applications.
One can summarize the functions of NfC as follows: 1) card emulation mode, 2) reader and writer
mode, and 3) peer-to-peer (P2P) mode. In the card
emulation mode, the NfC device operates like a conventional RfID card and can be identified by the
reader regardless of the power status of the device (on
or off). In the card emulation mode, the base station
(master) is a point-of-sale (POS) terminal or a transport gate, and the transponder is the handset + universal subscriber identity module (USIM) pair, which
behaves like a contactless card. In the reader and
writer mode, the NfC device operates as a tag reader.
In this mode, a mobile phone operates as a reader that
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