Another team looked at the potential for using NFC for easily tracking patients' within a hospital, offering the staff of healthcare institutions the ability to track a patient's movements in real-time. Another looked at the feasibility of using NFC to create "stores without borders". "Their idea was if products people buy were already NFC-enabled in theory you could just be anywhere in the world and you see a product that you're interested in and you tap your phone and you can then go through an ordering process on your phone," Brookes said. The retail team also looked at using NFC to hail taxis at taxi ranks, by tapping with your phone.

NFC "needs to find its niche", he said. "One of the things our student teams struggled with was what can you do with an NFC tag that you can't already do with a QR code or with RFID or with something else? What is NFC uniquely good for? There are examples of that -- obviously location-based applications and services; the convenience (people often don't use QR codes because of the difficulty of getting your phone out and finding the right app and scanning it.

"I think it's about finding the niche of applications, finding the killer application for NFC where NFC is the ideal technology as opposed to using something else."