It was cool talking with Jeremy Galen @ Mirth and he raises a good point. Daily deals don't work for tons of businesses and can destroy value. So, what's the best way to bring in and retain customers and reward them without deals? I don't know if Mirth is the perfect answer yet, but they're asking the right question.
I'm not sure your views on timing are appropriate. Airplanes revolutionized travel, but I don't think everyone booked a trip once the Wright Brothers flew. I also don't get why competition amongst big players to "win" the payments, ticketing, and loyalty section is harmful or why it precludes NFC from succeeding in the West. Besides that, just because these are the three existing uses of NFC technology that people deem profitable, that doesn't mean there's not something else out there. It's young. I also think your arguement is targeted at B2C and I think it overlooks B2B uses.
You're right, I'm not paying any attention to B2B uses simply because I care little about them and in my opinion the only way on gaining mass adoption for NFC technology is consumer orientated.
In 2006, a year before the iPhone was released Mobile Suica was brought to the East Japanese market, NDEF was standardised by the NFC Forum, the first handset with NFC (the Nokia 6131) was released and a year later it was trialled by the Transport for London for use in their ticketing system but was rejected for being too slow at the gates. In 2009 NXP released the PN544 - currently one of the most common NFC chipsets used in mobile devices.
This technology has been around for several years now, and the press has talked about at length of carriers, transportation authorities, financial institutions and retailers "trialling" contactless payment in some form or another, very little has actually emerged in comparison. In addition there has been a handful of startup types either social network orientated or hardware/service orientated attempt to find some use case in the parts of the NFC specification (mostly surrounding read/write NDEF to card or SNEP to device) that can't be monopolised because as yet only one mobile OS maker (Blackberry) is opening the secure element - required for transactions. Nokia have also tried to push the non-secure parts of NFC when Symbian was more important to them in the market but are charging £20 for a single smart poster.
Perhaps there is some unfound use for NFC in both B2B and B2C that I, and the handfuls of other people have failed to see or the dozens of companies who've trialled this technology didn't make proper sense of. I'm still convinced this is a chicken and egg problem and the only reason it exists is from a lack of cohesion between multiple factors.
