people have mixed feelings about rfid technology, but not i. i'm convinced that rfid and its offshoot cousin, near-field communications (nfc)—a short-range wireless connectivity technology—are within four centimeters of changing our lives.

recently i met with inside contactless, a provence, france–based company that designs chips that go in contactless smart cards, pcs, and consumer electronics devices. this is not future technology. there are credit cards from chase, wells fargo, and other banks already have these chips and rfid technology embedded within them. they let consumers "blink" at rfid readers. in other words, the embedded technology replaces the magnetic strip on most credit cards and lets consumers wave the card at an rfid reader to make purchases. no swiping necessary.

this is a nifty and exciting technology, but not exactly transformative. however, nfc—so called because the tiny chip and the reader need to be within 4 centimeters of each other to communicate—has applications and implications that go far beyond credit card purchases.

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already, inside's technology can be found, well, inside cell phones in france and japan. the phones feature nfc chips based on inside's designs and are used in "credit card emulation mode" to make small purchases, such as using the local transit systems.

inside execs told me that nfc chips can also facilitate pairing of devices. we all know the hoops we sometimes have to jump through to get two bluetooth-enabled devices to talk to each other. with an nfc chip in a phone (analysts predict they could be in 50 percent of the shipping phones by 2009) and a reader in a laptop or desktop, the bluetooth pass codes could be transmitted in milliseconds, getting you that much closer to a working connection that much sooner. better yet, nfc can work even if your phone isn't charged. it uses the magnetic field induction to power the communication, which generally completes in 15 to 200 milliseconds.

again, these are exciting applications, but my mind tends to race forward, and the moment the executives mentioned an nfc chip in a cell phone that could work with razor-thin rfid and nfc chips in other places, i started to envision a very different future.—next: smart pants >