One of the more promising developments I saw at CTIA in Las Vegas this week was in the Gemalto booth. They now offer an embedded NFC chip add-on for phones.

The product is a thin film that fits neatly into the phone battery compartment and connects to the metal contacts of the SIM card. This provides the benefits of NFC contactless chips embedded into mobile phones without having to wait for hardware manufactures to provide them en masse. There’s nothing visible on the outside of the phone and it works on a wide variety of devices.

An embedded solution like this also has advantages over using NFC stickers. Stickers provide relatively static access to a single card. The Gemalto solution provides access to all the processing capabilities on the phone and therefore take advantage of the phone’s software and hardware capabilities. A native phone software application is used to manage security and interact with the user.

Therefore, the chip could provide interactive access to multiple cards and provide a user friendly interface via an application on the phone. So, this means a financial institution wanting to move forward with NFC could issue these chips to customers using a similar process to how they send out plastic credit cards or NFC stickers. In practice, institutions might want to train branch staff initially to show clients how it fits in the phone (although the hardware itself looks about as easy to install as a SIM card).

Most importantly, this lets organizations move forward on their own without everyone having to move at once. Banks, Loyalty card companies, transit agencies, carriers, or anyone else interested in moving forward with an NFC rollout can enable large numbers of phones without coordination delays necessary in device manufacturing and wireless carrier product schedules.

Furthermore, as projects are successful and adoption reaches critical mass, device manufactures can add NFC chips to their devices with the confidence that they will see a return on their investment.

At the end of the day, this is one more barrier removed toward NFC adoption.

My first day at CTIA in San Diego seems to sum up my experience in the overall mobile market. There are lots of smart people all pulling the industry in separate directions, yet we keep moving forward despite ourselves.

The keynote started with the FCC Chairman pointing out his business experience and love for free market solutions at every opportunity. He made the case that Net Neutrality regulation is an attempt to keep the market open and fair and not allow intervention by any parties.

Then AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega spoke and made the opposite case that carriers don’t need regulation because the US market has been so successful.

I saw the stats in market share and devices supported and I don’t doubt it. But what matters is the ultimate usefulness to end users. At the end of the day we pay more for less capability here in the US. Yet overall the mobile ecosystem grew by 16% last year, according to de la Vega.

To this point, Ericson demoed an application for carriers used outside the US to coordinate mobile ads between agencies and carriers. It’s a shame such an app even needs to exist to keep the peace. It’s even more sad that it seems nothing like it is even used here. We’re just stuck.

I did have fun playing with bCode’s kiosk that scans an SMS message off the phone image and prints a paper barcode for POS scanning. I also enjoyed seeing the Barnes & Noble book reader application on many devices. $100 million were spent on ebooks last year. I suspect growth will be steep this year.

Of course there were also NFC solutions. Poor NFC, everyone is innovating so hard around the roadblocks that never seem to go away. It’s not fair to blame this entirely on the carriers, but I don’t see concrete movement to end the stalemate.

In the end, I’m seeing real companies make real money with mobile, despite all the challenges.

This is what it’s all about.

I’m headed to CTIA in San Diego this week. I’ll be there Wednesday through mid-day Friday. I hope to meet up with many of you.

Drop me a line to schedule a meeting time if you’re planning to be at the show.