Based on radiofrequency identification tested during the Second World War, near-field communication (NFC) standards became global in 2004 after several years of prototyping and development.

Beyond the fact that it is an open standard, NFC has many advantages; it is an economic technology enabling dynamic multimodel interaction which can be summarized by “3S”: Security, Speed and Simplicity. Just by enabling your smartphone, you are able to interact with the real world and enrich it with all information from the virtual world.

Objects with an NFC tag become communicating and biologically alive: the simple gesture of a tap allows NFC-enabled smartphones to collect and exchange information, to pair two devices allowing them to communicate, to open a door or to pay for something.

This work is divided into three chapters, showing NFC as an essential link in the chain of the future’s mobiquitous information systems:

• – A theoretical chapter discussing state-of-the-art of NFC. We will show its technical characteristics as well as its operating modes.
• – A technical chapter on NFC mobile programming with Android, addressing each aspect of NFC implementation.
• – A practical chapter with concrete application scenarios, in which we provide examples of use cases based on MBDS prototyping from 2004, in the three modes of NFC standard.