Syndicat des Transports d’Ile-de-France has unveiled the design for the new Passe Navigo, which will be compatible with NFC-enabled mobile phones.
Syndicat des Transports d’Ile-de-France has unveiled the design for the new Passe Navigo, which will be compatible with NFC-enabled mobile phones.
The very reason I hate using acronyms instead of actual words. To most Americans NFC means National Football Conference. To some of us in the Federal Govt, it means National Finance Center which does a lot of payroll work for various agencies. I have no idea what it means in this usage. I can imagine a football feed enhanced phone that only gets NFC games; so you can watch the Giants but not the Jets. Doesn’t seem all that useful…
Given the context, I would think it means the transportation agency for Paris is coming out with an electronic payment system that will allow users with smart phones to pay their bus and subway fares with their phones using a tap payment system similar to the smart cards on the DC metro.
Sorry for any confusion. NFC refers to near-field communications, which allows two-way radio communication between devices like smart phones and contactless smart cards. This is just an excerpt from the full post in The Transit Wire, which focuses on transit technology and where most regular readers think radio, not football, when they see a story about NFC-enabled phones.
I assumed something like that. I apologize for being snide. I’ve had an axe to grind over non-exclusive acronyms. We had a division in my old agency reorganize and split into two. They called the new divisions CIA and IBM and although these silly names only lasted a few months, I gave them no end of hell for it. Why not MIC and KEY?