Nokia has made an agreement with a Taiwan taxi company to provide consumers with an easily accessible NFC-based (Near Field Communication) service. Now people can book cabs by touching their mobile phones against NFC-enabled posters.

Photo: Taiwan Taxi poster, from mynokiablog.com

Once users touch the poster, they receive a SMS from Taiwan Taxi confirming the order for a cab and an order number that they give to the driver as proof of order. There is no need of tapping an address because each poster is location aware.

Initially, the service will be tried out at Nokia’s Taiwan office, then the service will be rolled out to more than 15,000 sites in Taiwan. The sites will include Nokia branded retail stores, Taiwan Mobile stores, lottery stations, convenience stores, restaurants and shopping centers.

If everything runs good, the new Nokia service will make a competition between taxis stronger, though it will facilitate users’ life and save their time. Nokia’s latest N9 smartphone is also NFC-supporting.

NFC-phones industry is growing increasingly. NFC is exploding in the USA as well. Google is working hard on developing and improving its Google Wallet, an NFC-based app that is to replace a regular billfold.

According to a Yankee Group study, there were just 834,000 NFC-enabled mobile phones globally in 2010, but it is to rise to 151 million by 2014.