The Mobile Wallet: NFC Tech Coming To WP7?

"Near Field Communication (NFC), in our opinion, will be the big story of late 2011 as it finally becomes widely adopted in the marketplace. NFC is basically a small chipset component that can store vital information e.g. credit card data, making your phone a virtual payment system for use in stores--you simply swipe your phone near the reader, enter your pin and you're good to go."

Let's be honest here - this isn't exactly new technology, NFC is already in commercial use in Japan for instance. But like any promising tech, you've got to have a lot of things in place before you have mass acceptance like hardware, software, industry standards, and most of all, killer applications. But it looks like WP7 is already on the NFC bandwagon, with at least one WP7 OEM looking into it and Nokia already committed for their regular lineup (and hopefully for their WP7 phones as well). So that's one part of the equation that's holding up. Now, about the rest...