An alternative for the "hyperconnected"

The survey result is that more than 38% of respondents chose their mobile phones, and less than 30% choose their wallets. This is good news for our industry, as smart cards in the form of SIM cards are present in more than 3 billion handsets worldwide. On the other hand, smart cards have also penetrated wallets for a large part of humanity, but with a diversity of purposes: ID cards, healthcare cards, and of course payment cards. But the figures don't get close to SIM figures. We can estimate roughly the total number of EMV cards shipped to be around 700 million, and the number of contactless payment cards can be evaluated well over 50 million. The good news is that our industry stands at the crossroads of all these directions. The concrete implementation of this is the development of NFC. Already more than 150 NFC projects have been launched, and analysts anticipate almost 300 million NFC devices in 2012.

Through the IDC survey, Nortel was looking to find out how many workers around the world can be defined as "hyperconnected," defined as using at least seven devices for work and personal access, in addition to at least nine applications like instant messaging, text messaging or web conferencing. The country with the highest percentage of hyperconnected respondents in the study was China. Canada and the United Arab Emirates had the fewest number among the 17 countries covered in the survey. The survey also predicts the number of the hyperconnected will likely rise to 40% in five years.

Now, the mobile phone industry and the smart transactions industry can propose an alternative to the IDC-Nortel "hyperconnected" definition. With a NFC-enabled smart phone, there is no need for seven access devices! May be, one day, a handset will be enough to perform all our daily tasks: payment, access to information, exchange with peers, … and of course voice transmission.

Thierry Spanjaard
Chief Editor
Smart Insights