I almost liked NFC

When I first heard that "near-field communication" technology was being added to cell phones, I had a vision of a local area networking platform that would allow your phone or other portables device to interact with other devices over short distances of about 2 meters.

Having previously developed an approval voting lunch decision site named LunchVote, my mind quickly conceived of a serverless mobile iteration of the same that would facilitate a group of people to quickly decide where they would like to eat lunch by using approval voting while standing in a small circle.

Had near-field communication—NFC as we know it now—been a ~2-meter ad hoc local area communication platform, something like this serverless, peer-to-peer, local-area LunchVote would have been possible.

But NFC is not that. Instead of creating a communication channel with a range of a few meters, NFC is for sending small amounts of data a few inches.

This is why NFC disappoints me. It's not as interesting to me as the ad hoc small-size local network I imagined when I first heard the words. Instead, it's QR codes for 2013.

I'm not strictly against innovation in areas I don't care about. But it's hard to not feel disappointment when R&D effort is being squandered on something less desirable.