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  • Google Joins NFC Forum, To Get "NFC Forever!!!" Tattoo Next Week

    Greg Kumparak

    Greg Kumparak is the Mobile Editor at Techcrunch. Greg has been writing for the TechCrunch network since May of 2008. Greg was born just outside of San Jose, and now lives in the East Bay of California. → Learn More

    Thursday, March 31st, 2011

    NFC (the short-range communications tech that’ll allow us to pay for things with a Jedi-esque wave of our phones) is coming. Hell — it’s already here. It’s just got a mountain of technical and logistical hurdles to overcome before any of us will actually be using it in our day-to-day lives.

    Fortunately, there’s a massive group, the NFC Forum, focused on little more than killin’ off these hurdles one by one. Their roster is impressive, to say the least, with the likes of AT&T, Qualcomm, Motorola, RIM, and LG amongst their members. Today, they’re adding one more tech monster to the list: Google.

    Google’s already thrown their support behind NFC with Android (where they’ve steadily been adding payment-focused APIs over the last few months), so their fondness of the tech is nothing new. At this point, buyin’ their way into the forum is pretty much just a pledge to stick with the tech — and, perhaps, to influence the standards/specs a bit as they’re finalized.

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