One of the hottest areas in mobile development is NFC. NFC stands for Near Field Communication and is a game changer in mobile functionality. It allows the instant exchange of information between two devices or devices and passive objects called “tags.” It’s a technology which opens the door for awesome features like mobile payments at the tap of a smartphone.

Do you get annoyed at having to open an application to take a picture of a QR Code? NFC tags can automatically trigger the application on your mobile device that will process the data, making the transfer of data seamless to your user. In fact, you can actually program the NFC tag to perform tasks on the users device to do things like configure a WiFi connection automatically.

If you pair NFC with the Salesforce Mobile SDK, you can rapidly build cutting-edge NFC applications. I was excited to play with this technology firsthand, so I built a simple hybrid mobile application with Salesforce Mobile SDK and NFC. The application reads vCard formatted NFC tags and upserts the contact details into Force.com. If you’ve been following along this months awesome articles on mobile application development, then you should be primed to start building your own NFC-enabled mobile apps.

Check out my article that teaches you how to get started building a hybrid mobile application with NFC today. I’m excited to see what innovative applications the Force.com community builds with these building blocks! So go forth and start tagging and scanning with NFC and Force.com!