When people talk about NFC, most people seem to be talking about only payments. The article talks about other uses as well for NFC. To me, NFC is a bridge betwe

When people talk about NFC, most people seem to be talking about only payments. The article talks about other uses as well for NFC. To me, NFC is a bridge between the real world and the virtual world. I look at an NFC tag on an object or a physical entity as really a door that leads to its digital manifestation in the virtual world. Some things are done better (or can only be done) in the real world and some are done better in the virtual world. For example, walking into a store to take a look at the product and try it out for yourself has to be done in the real world! However, finding out what others think about it or it's pricing history is better done online. What NFC does is marry the two worlds seamlessly. Where previously the user had to do this manually on his phone while at the store, a scan of the NFC tag could readily bring up all the relevant information. Bar codes and QR codes make this possible as well - so I cannot quite answer yet why NFC tags would be better for this. But there are other cases of active-active interactions (as opposed to active-passive interactions) where a passive bar code or QR code wouldn't be enough. A good example of this is authenticating someone in person where authentication relies on both the physical proximity (which is established with an NFC scan) and a crypto protocol to establish the identity that is best handled by your mobile device. Mobile payments happens to be one use-case of the active-active interaction where physical proximity is transformed to an interaction in the virtual world. Admittedly the biggest use-case though.