Mobile operators, banks and others have been carrying out a lot of experiments and pilots with this technology the last years without any signs of significant market adaptation. It has basically been a classical chicken and egg dilemma. Device manufacturers haven’t been willing to take the cost of incorporating NFC technology into mobile devices because of the lack of services utilizing the technology and potential service providers haven’t been able to launch services because people don’t have devices supporting the technology.

The mobile NFC usage which has been given the most attention is that of contactless payment and ticketing. Anyhow, the way I see it nothing will really happen until the device manufacturers decide to make NFC a standard phone feature. Nokia, Sagem and Samsung have launched a few handsets but basically it has been pretty quiet around NFC for some time.

Then, yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced that Gingerbread, the upcoming update to Android that will roll out in the next few weeks, will include support for NFC. Schmidt demonstrated the NFC features on what seemed to be a Nexus S, meaning that this is a phone made to Google’s own specifications to show off the full specter of what Android is capable of. Let’s just hope the OEMs get the idea and jump on the NFC bandwagon… This time it looks like Google beat Apple to it, but rumours  still state that the next iPhone will have NFC technology incorporated.

Today we could read that German operators T-Mobile, Vodafone and O2 are planning to introduce a mobile payment service as an extension to the current version of Mpass which is used for online payments only. The new service will allow customers to make payments in retail stores, via devices equipped with NFC.

As well as information that US mobile operators AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless have banded together to build a national mobile commerce network called Isis, allowing users to make point of sale purchases using mobile phones and NFC technology.

With all this NFC news being announced at the same time everything points in the direction that NFC is ready to enter the stage to become an important ingredient for enhanced mobile services making mobile devices able to interact with physical objects in a way never seen before. The battle of control will be between operators, handset vendors or platform providers as to who controls the secure element. I guess Google and Apple won’t let that slip to the operators who want the secure element in the SIM. [Read more about the Single Wire Protocol interface]

Here are some additional thoughts on the matter from analyst Dean Bubley (@disruptivedean)

The features of Game Center are however not new and several other firms provide similar services; OpenFeint, Plus+, Crystal, Gameloft Live, Scoreloop and AGON Online. For game developers these social layers are optional and work as a layer on top of the actual game. Some, like OpenFeint, also serve as a platform to advertise other “OpenFeint enabled” games.

I myself see a much larger benefit of using a service that goes across different mobile platforms. After all, most of my friends don’t own an iPhone, and most of the big titles try to maximise their potential market reach by porting their games to several smartphone platforms.

Which of the emerging social gaming layers that will prevail is difficult to predict, but being incorporated into numerous future games definately creates a desirable (cross OS) position for collecting valuable stats and even in-game ad placement.

The type of apps that always seem to bedazzle the first time user are music recognition apps like SonyEricsson TrackID, Shazam or SoundHound. All these services basically work in the same manner. They enable you to sample some seconds from a song you are listening to and within a few seconds compare the distinct acoustic pattern to a large music library and provide you with the details you are seeking.

Seen from a marketing perspective this is a brillinat piece of technology. It helps people in an elegant way, when their attention and emotions towards a particular piece of music is at it’s highest, to provide information that helps the user identify the title or artist which they are interested in, and even by an additional click guide them straight into a digital store (e.g Apple iTunes, Amazon etc.) where they can purchase the newly identified tune .

So someone created a powerful music recognition tool, but is there any money in providing this kind of service? My guess is that they might be one of the very few capable of financially benefitting from for instance Apple’s iTunes affiliate program. Apple only provides a lousy 4 percent kickback to marketeers managing to redirect customers into iTunes and purchase content. This will benefit the marketeer with $ 0.05 for every purchased $ 1.29 song, and $ 0.56 for every purchased $ 13.99 album. The key obviously has to do with scale.

In mid May this year Shazam announced that they had 75 million users of their service with a growth of 25 million the past 6 months. CEO, Andrew Fisher, stated that he was confident they would manage to grow their user base to 100 million by the end of the year. The news came out as the company also revealed that it had identified more than one billion songs in the ten years since it first launched. In January this year, Shazam said that its mobile apps were generating 260 000 track purchases a day, through songs tagged by its users. Analysis from Billboard at the time estimated that this meant Shazam was responsible for 6.3 percent of all global single-track downloads.

Time will show what the future holds for Shazam and its likens but they are allready thinking of new ways for us to engage with their technology. Shazam stated in an interview with the New York Times that their intention with their iPad app is to attract and capitalize on the television-viewing audience.

The battle of who becomes the preferred music recognition engine intensified this week when SoundHound and HTC announced a global partnership enabling SoundHound to be preinstalled on HTC devices, starting with the HTC Desire HD and HTC Desire Z.

Anyhow, these music recognition services show that aiding end users in discovering content can pay off… if you manage to scale… even if you don’t own the shop itself. That should give everyone building an app store (especially Telcos) something to think about…