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Nokia punts NFC touch-data biz cards at £11 each

A better business than selling phones?

Nokia has set up an NFC Hub to sell NFC to businesses, both figuratively and literally, offering everything you need to wirelessly enable your PR material.

Not that such enabling comes cheap, at least not from Nokia. An A4 poster will set you back £20, while NFC-enabled business cards come in at £11 each, which seems a bit steep. For that money the NFC Hub will take care of forwarding the embedded URLs to your chosen location, or maintain a link to a Facebook Like page or similar.

While Near Field Communications is often taken to be a proximity payment technology, Nokia is keen to emphasis its other applications, not least because, as NFC World reports, neither of the two NFC phones currently being produced by the company (the C7 and N9) have a secure element, or connection to the SIM, capable of supporting electronic transactions.

That limits those handsets to some of the more interesting, but less profitable, applications of the technology. Nokia told NFC World that such applications would be the focus for the next 18 months or so, pushing applications for NFC as exemplified by Nokia's Play 360 speakers:

Nokia holds a lot of intellectual property in NFC, and stands to gain from widespread adoption of the technology, so has set up the NFC Hub to provide small companies with an easy way to launch their very own NFC campaign.

Easy is the key word here, as the marginally-more technically literate might like to buy an NFC sticker, program it themselves with an NFC phone, and attach it to the back of their own artwork. NFC stickers can be bought for as little as a dollar a time, and pre-programmed business cards will only set you back $1.50 or so, if you shop around.

But the NFC Hub does offer simplicity, and will sell you individual items (stickers, for example, normally come in packs of 50). So if you don't really understand NFC, but you'd like a £20 poster advertising that fact to your customers, then Nokia is here to help. ®

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