Koichi Tagawa Receives NFC Forum Lifetime Achievement Award

Near Field Communications (NFC) is one of the most prevalent technologies with more than 20% of the world’s population using it weekly or daily. This steady spread of NFC technology across the globe was led for many years by Koichi Tagawa, long-time former NFC Forum chair of the board and Sony senior executive.

For his role in developing NFC standards and passionate promotion of the technology, Tagawa-san was honored by the NFC Forum with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The NFC Forum is the global standards-body for NFC technology.

Today, billions of people use NFC to buy groceries, unlock their cars and hotel rooms, access public transportation, connect to smart devices, retrieve healthcare information and store identity credentials. NFC is standard on smartphones or smartwatches and can be embedded into almost anything and accessed with a tap of a smartphone or other NFC-enabled device.

“I was never the visionary in the NFC Forum. Others had the vision to see how important NFC would become around the world,” said Tagawa-san. “I tried to be a Chair who would drive people to participate and work together. We built a strong industry association and created over 28 specifications and standards that are the foundation of the technology. We successfully harmonized the specifications to create an interoperable NFC ecosystem to operationalize the technology for consumer and business use.”

Tagawa-san helped found the NFC Forum in 2004 and has served as either vice chair or chair since then. He stepped down from the chair position earlier this year leaving the NFC Forum with 250 member companies and in a strong position to begin the next phase in the association’s existence.

“Over the lifetime of the NFC Forum, thousands of engineers and business leaders have contributed to enabling the contactless lifestyle we all enjoy today,” said Mike McCamon, executive director, NFC Forum. “We were honored to recognize Tagawa-san for his tremendous contributions to our mission.”

“I believe the most profound moment in the history of NFC and the NFC Forum was the moment we discovered how to simplify complicated device commissioning and connectivity with just a tap of a smartphone,” said Tagawa-san. “It was a true breakthrough that solved a real problem and launched an entirely new market segment.”