Will history repeat itself?

There was/is the 12 keys keypad cellphone.
And few care about Touch.
Then came the iPhone.
Now everyone loves Touch.

There was the operator Deck.
Everyone hated the Deck.
Then came Apple.
And created the App Store.
Now everyone loves the App Stores.
And everyone still hates the Deck.

There was RFID. Then came NFC.
With clear use-cases and business-models.
Yet it has taken forever to deploy this.
Pilots and more pilots, when it is going to end?
Embedded chip-sets or stickers.
But few seem get it. (Nokia does!)
Who is going to take the first big step?
Operators don’t get it. Or do they?
And stuck with pilots they are.
“Hey, this is great!”, the pilots say.
Enablement is expensive! That is what they say.
But guess what?
Proximity support, the iPhone will have.
And all of the sudden, “RFID/NFC on the go” everyone will want.

And I say, if the iPhone introduces support for proximity, it will trigger the mobile RFID/NFC revolution… Wanna bet?

Here, some rumors via the NFC World Blog:

NFC specialist Narian Technologies and who runs the Near Field Communications Group on Linkedin.com, has reported the following:

Had to share this news. A highly reliable source has informed me that Apple has built some prototypes of the next gen iPhone with an RFID reader built in and they have seen it in action. So its not full NFC but its a start for real service discovery and I’m told that the reaction was very positive that we can expect this in the next gen iPhone.

If Apple does it, expect every phone manufacturer and their sister to begin pumping out NFC enabled phones, at least for service discovery and sync.

This just reinforces what we knew based on the two separate patents Apple submitted that had the iPhone enabled to read RFID tags. I’m told that the touch project video and the BT SIG’s specs were all driving forces to push this forward as well as other factors.

Guess I’ll be touching my iPhone to my Mac to link them together to sync iTunes by next year.