The global advocacy and standards association for Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, the NFC Forum, has recently announced that it has signed an IoT liaison agreement with AIM. Apparently, the association has also extended an ongoing partnership with the Japan Automotive Software Platform and Architecture (JasPar) organization.
Referring to a press release from NFC Forum, this liaison agreement with AIM is focused on the IoT market, promoting an objective of NFC Forum to partner with complimentary technologies for using NFC to assist in connecting, commissioning and controlling the estimated 36 billion IoT devices which would be in use by 2020.
The NFC Forum and AIM would seemingly be working together for mutually educating the market and helping towards building an ecosystem for NFC in IoT and industrial applications. This alliance is crucial for enabling interoperability, growth and adoption in relation with Automated Data Capture technologies as well as the businesses using this technology in the marketplace.
Further from the reports, the relationship with JasPar was augmented for allowing both the groups to work more closely, for expanding the utilization of NFC in automotive market. Recently, JasPar has initiated a Digital Car Key group, as a target application for NFC, within the organization.
The agreement purportedly enhances the existing relationship between the NFC Forum and JasPar for including the sharing of technical specifications and documents, co-creation of non-technical documents and the co-development of NFC automotive requirements and use cases.
Executive director of NFC Forum, Paula Hunter, mentioned that the automotive and IoT markets are rapidly growing areas for NFC technology. The agreements with JasPar and AIM are joint opportunities for working with new technologies and developing interoperability use cases for promoting the usage of NFC in automotive and IoT applications worldwide.
Mary Lou Bosco, Chief Operating Officer of AIM, stated that every organization has unique industry expertise and perspectives that would be valuable to this relationship.