Editor’s note: As we get toward the end of 2023, RFIDJournal.com is looking back at some of the top stories that we published in the last year.
Nearly 20 years after helping to found the NFC Forum, Koichi Tagawa, Sony‘s former general manager, stepped down from his position as chair at the standards organization in 2022. He leaves behind a much-changed industry and standards group. Tagawa has had a front seat in the vehicle driving the technology’s expansion and growth. Beginning with a simple concept—building Near Field Communication (NFC) payments into mobile phones—the Forum has guided the technology into a wide-spread set of wireless solutions, ranging from ticketing and payments to consumer engagement and wireless charging.
Tagawa has spent a large portion of his career as an advocate for NFC market expansion, as well as the development of more than 20 standards-based specifications, which led to interoperable NFC-based solutions worldwide. Initially serving as the organization’s vice-chair, he was elected to the chair position in 2008. Last year, Tagawa stepped down from his leadership role, and he now serves as the Japan representative at professional services company Virtual.
Koichi Tagawa has guided the NFC Forum through the development of 20 standards aimed at the deployment of NFC technology using smartphones.
Tagawa’s career background includes working at Dai Nippon Printing. He joined Sony in 1976 in the company’s audio labs and audio business divisions. As audio technology transitioned from speakers to headsets and Walkmans, Tagawa joined Sony’s research and development staff to pursue new areas of technological innovation. He began representing Sony at standards bodies in areas related to optical discs from the consumer electronics side of the business.
NFC’s Early Days as a Ticketing Solution
Around 2000, NFC entered Tagawa’s field of interest. “I was reporting to the CTO of Sony at that time,” he recalls, and was serving at multiple standards groups, when he received an invitation from technology companies Philips and Nokia. The two businesses were interested in contactless cards, such as those Sony already provided for Japan Railway, which passengers could tap against a terminal to ride trains. The prepaid Suica cards came with built-in ICs that stored data linked to prepaid accounts, and that transmitted data when interrogated to Sony’s FeliCa smartcard readers at 13.56 MHz.
Philips and Nokia were interested in working with Sony to develop standards for building such cards directly into mobile phones, to enable users to accomplish contactless payments with their handsets. This was a groundbreaking concept, Tagawa says, since smartphones were not yet on the market. “They said that with Sony being one of the leaders in this contactless card businesses already,” he explains, “they would like us to join as a founder [of an organization] to pursue this new opportunity.”
Tagawa’s knowledge of the technology was limited to his one use of the train commuter cards. Therefore, he took the suggestion to Sony’s business division overseeing work on the contactless cards at that time. “I talked to them… and in the end, they said ‘We don’t have the resources to support that activity.'” That could have ended his and Sony’s involvement, but the company’s CTO encouraged Tagawa to learn about the technology and take on the project himself.
“That’s where it began,” Tagawa says. He got to work learning about the technology and its capabilities, and in 2003, Phillips, Nokia and Sony hosted a press conference to announce the establishment of the NFC Forum. Thereafter, Tagawa recalls, Sony’s contactless business division started to see the importance of the Forum’s activity, and it assigned several people knowledgeable about the technology to the Forum’s working groups.
“We grew very quickly,” Tagawa recalls. Within three years, he says, the NFC Forum exceeded 100 member companies, “and it was a very busy place.” While the concept of NFC technology use was initially centered around building the plastic card functionality into phones to pay for transportation, it was beginning to expand.
Planning and Innovation at the NFC Forum
Some of the early interest in the technology came from mobile network operators, which recommended using NFC as a source of revenue by charging a business or cardholder for every tap transaction. Another industry interested in the potential around NFC transactions was the credit card sector. Large financial companies had a vision of managing and charging for the use of NFC systems to tap and pay for products and services.
These credit card companies invested considerable resources into the NFC Forum, Tagawa recalls, “and they helped to propel NFC technology forward.” Sony and Phillips represented the consumer electronics industry, with a strong interest in leveraging the technology within their own products. Visa and MasterCard, meanwhile, had an enthusiastic team of professionals to bring NFC solutions to the market. Their efforts, Tagawa says, while separate from other NFC application development, helped to move the technology forward. “There was a cooperative effort. Their openness meant that these companies were able to work together.”
Eventually, the mobile network operators opted against charging a fee for every tap. Instead, they let service owners like Visa or MasterCard, as well as train operators (for ride payments), determine whether they would charge consumers—which they typically have not done. This led to escalated growth in NFC deployments. Standards have evolved, however, as more opportunities arose.
Experts on the NFC Forum’s technical committee had a broader vision than simply building NFC card functionality into phones, Tagawa says. As smartphones evolved, the devices offered functionality that a plastic card could not. “A card does not have a power supply,” he explains, “so it only reacts to the terminal as a card.” On the other hand, a phone has its own built-in power and can be connected to a network.
New Standards Drive NFC Development
The team began creating specifications enabling smartphones to emulate a card, and to act as an NFC reader or terminal as well. The NFC Forum created the resulting standard, known as reader-writer mode enabling. For the first time, Tagawa says, phones could act as payment terminals and transportation points of contact, providing greater mobility than traditional kiosks or train gates.
NFC reading functionality is not something every consumer would carry in their phone. But with the NFC Forum’s vision and the specification, it became relatively easy to set up a trusted payment system on a phone, enabling people to directly accept funds from others, for everything from private sales to shared restaurant bills. “We owe this to the visionaries on the technical committee at the Forum who initially [imagined] this kind of usage,” Tagawa says.
Peer-to-peer transactions, in which a phone reads data when permitted from another phone, have their own specification at the NFC Forum. Such transactions may not expand, however, as current phone connections to the Internet make it faster for them to share content directly via access to cloud-based servers. These days, NFC can exchange credentials for Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections in a car or at home, allowing users to tap their phones against a device, such as a car’s dashboard, to launch the wireless connection of their choice.
Another application Tagawa finds interesting is the use of NFC technology in museums to allow patrons to automatically access content, such as videos or sound recordings, about exhibits by tapping their phones against an NFC tag. He says the NFC Forum continues to encourage its members, as well as nonmembers, to create new such applications leveraging the functionality of NFC.
One recent specification centers around wireless charging mode, because NFC-enabled phones can transmit RF energy to tags as part of the interrogation process, and they can also energize small devices, such as earphones or stylus pens. By using NFC for this functionality, such devices would not need a separate antenna for wireless charging. There are discussions underway to increase the power of wireless charging, Tagawa says, adding, “Right now it’s up to one watt, and we’re working to get it up to three-plus watts because enterprises and applications need more power.”
A Lifetime of NFC Technology Achievement
After 14 years in a leadership role, the NFC Forum attributes much of its success to Koichi Tagawa. “Tagawa has been the key person to help competing companies work together,” says Mike McCamon, the NFC Forum’s executive director. “He has a skill for bringing together companies with disparate needs.” Tagawa brought the ability to get everybody on the same page, McCamon recalls, and to work together.
Tagawa says he hopes to see the NFC Forum and the use of Near Field Communication technologies continue to grow. “I think the NFC Forum still has challenge,” he states, “but I expect to see a time when NFC makes life easier and happier and more enjoyable.” Three billion smartphones worldwide now include NFC technology, he notes. His focus has turned to a variety of standards organizations for which he provides virtual support to help them engage with each other.
“I think we’re starting to be able to establish a community of people who understand similar problems, similar dreams and visions,” Tagawa says. He received an NFC Forum Lifetime Achievement Award last year, and collaboration is what he attributes to the organization’s success. “I have often said that one company alone may be able to establish a business, but to establish an industry, people with the same dream must work hard together in good faith to get there.”
Key Takeaways:
- Koichi Tagawa has guided the NFC Forum through the development of 20 standards aimed at the deployment of NFC technology using smartphones.
- Tagawa envisions innovations to continue using reader-writer mode and wireless charging, as well as card emulation, to put more functionality in the hands of phone users.