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.