Forecasts of complicated product adoption are, well, complicated. Consider the use of near field communications to drive mobile payments. 

A 2009 analysis from Juniper Research (News - Alert) of the $110bn NFC opportunity forecasted that one in every six mobile subscribers (about 17 percent) globally will have an NFC enabled device by 2014. Adoption was expected to be highest in the Far East, with use very limited outside of that region.

The latest forecast from Juniper Research suggests that at least 20 percent of smartphones will support NFC by 2014, about 300 million phones. 

By 2014, Juniper now predicts that North America will account for just under half of NFC smartphones, followed by Western Europe. 

IHS (News - Alert) iSuppli, for its part, now predicts 93.2 million NFC-equipped cellphones will ship worldwide in 2011, up from its December 2010 forecast of 79.8 million. In 2014, 411.8 million NFC cell phones are forecast to ship, compared to 220.1 million in the previous prediction.

Shipments then will rise to 544.7 million in 2015, says iSuppli, so that 30.5 percent of all cell phones shipped that year would come with NFC capabilities.

Eric Schmidt (News - Alert), Google's executive chairman, believes that a third of point of sale terminals in retail stores and restaurants will be upgraded to allow NFC payments within the next year, the Financial Times reported. 

But upgrading a third of the terminals in the United States within a year would be a tall order, given that, at present, only about two percent of the roughly 7 million card-accepting merchant locations in the United States have been equipped with contactless POS terminals since the U.S. contactless-payment rollout began seven years ago. And many merchant locations have multiple POS terminals.

Also, mobile payments require the creation of a complicated new ecosystem. Retailers, end users, terminal providers, transaction providers, settlements networks or clearinghouses, mobile operators and application providers all need to derive tangible value, and then agree to participate. 

Since there are multiple contenders in each part of the ecosystem, rival systems will develop, creating fragmentation. All of that will slow adoption. For that reason alone, it will not be possible to directly predict NFC mobile payments adoption simply by pointing to the percentage of NFC-equipped devices being sold, or in the installed base. It is far more complicated than that.

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