NFC or Near Field Communication is the big buzz word at the moment and everybody is talking about it. The truth is that the technology is nothing new and it has been around for a long time. Nokia had an NFC enabled phone in 2007, it was called the Nokia 6131.
Google has made the term mainstream with their announcement of Google Wallet and most people think of NFC as a way to pay with their mobile device. But that is not all.
We actually have a wall of NFC to showcase all kinds of uses for the technology right in our office.
So what else can you do with NFC apart from using it for payments?
There are already plenty of examples out there.
Below you can find 6 examples on how NFC can be used right now.
1. Use your NFC enabled phone as the key to your hotel room
For the recent Olympics in London a Holiday Inn Hotel gave their VIP customers a Samsung Galaxy S3 as part of their 40 VIP rooms. The guests were able to check in and out of the hotel, as well as change the AC, control the TV, and unlock their rooms with the phone.
Using NFC in your phone as a key to open doors has been used in the Enterprise world as well. The phones were used to enable physical access systems in buildings and track employee time-clock check-ins and attendance, access staff parking areas or cafeterias and pay for services.
NFC tags could be placed inside meeting or conference rooms, and attendees could tap their compatible devices to silence them or to turn on Wi-Fi, for example.
we have seen how Nokia wants to bend the future of phones with flexible displays and now Nokias future lab showed us a concept video on how it could all work together.
nanotechnology, with a bendable transparent display and a fully touch sensitive casing are only some of the visions that Nokia cooked up.
Check out the video:
not sure if I agree with all of it, but there are some nice ideas in it.
It’s great to see some fun uses for NFC trickling through. It’s taken a while though, with Nokias’ first NFC enabled hand set having hit the market in 2006
The success of Tesco’s new retail store in Korea is something to behold:
Why? Because there is no physical store and no physical product. However the experience of the store has been fully recreated two dimensionally as a backlit poster with the products and ordering fulfilled using mobile and QR codes. It’s a neat idea and solves a number of issues:
1. The familiar supermarket experience. Tick! 2. Impulse shopping. Tick! 3. Cheap rent. Tick! 4. Open a new store in high traffic areas in one day. Tick! 5. No internal fit out costs. Tick! 6. No need to stock shelves Tick! 7. No Staff wages. Tick! 8. Open 24hrs. Tick! The list goes on.
Personally I’d like to see NFC integration as well as QR codes. I think we can also expect to see these walls become screens rather than printed products in the very near future.
you might have seen this already, but I somehow missed it in my post here.
I was send the video at the bottom of this post and it blew my mind. Looks like there was a working version of it at CES this year.
This camera (concept) takes the connectivity and application platform capabilities of today’s smart phones and wirelessly connects them with interchangeable full SLR-quality optics.
We all like music, right? I mean, some of us profess to enjoy it more properly, appropriately or adequately than others – this here Superior Hipster for example:
…but when you get down to it, pretty much everybody likes it.
So, we all want more of it, right? Thus the dawn and success of the iPod, and various other MP3 players. We could carry our thousands of tunes with us everywhere we went, beautiful.
Read on through my rambles to find out what I think the best music streaming service available to Australians is (so far). Read the rest of this entry »
This is a concept mobile phone of the future that was put together by Billy May. He gathered community feedback and followed up on some rather mundane visions for the mobile future to bring us the Mozilla Seabird.
The big innovation is the use of dual pico projectors on the side of the handset, which can provide different functionality based on the phone’s orientation: flat on a table they pump out the two halves of a QWERTY keyboard, up on a dock they offer the dual purpose of a large viewing screen above and a seamless projected keyboard below. Other features, like the pop-out wireless pointer / Bluetooth headset are slightly less realistic but no less charming.
unfortunately Mozilla is not planning on building this phone (or any other phone for that matter)
But check out the video – what I like is that it runs Android, but when you dock it it runs Windows 7 – nice!
SMSlingshot is an autonom working device, equipped with a high frequency radio, hacked arduino board, laser and batteries. Text messages can be typed on a phone-sized wooden keypad which is integrated in an also wooden slingshot. After the message is finished, the user can aim on a media facade and send/shoot the message straight to the targeted point. It will then appear as a coloured splash with the message written within. The text message will also be real-time twittered – just in case.
Mashable have a really fantastic review of the 3G incarnation of the iPad – it’s a bit long though, so I’m going to shorten it down to only the necessary information (for lazy people) and throw an Australian perspective in at the end to balance out their US-centric complaints.
Microsoft today launched its new series of touchscreen mobile smartphones called Kin.
There is a 4GB and an 8GB version with 5 and 8 Megapixel cameras with flash, capable of HD video and both models focus heavily on all your social networks, e.g. Twitter and facebook.
It seems that these phones are targeted at 18 to 35 year olds.
check out the video here
not the phone I am going to go for, but impressive to see how MS is putting all its eggs into social networking.
In the last 10, the world has moved into digital. The word “digital” itself underlines the major role of technology. This year our Razorfish team led by our CTO Ray Velez created a report of 5 Technologies that will have great significance this year.
Cloud services and open APIs will become essential for social brands, making it easier for businesses to tap into the consumer’s social graph.
Reliance on the cloud’s infrastructure will continue to grow as the need for real-time scalability becomes increasingly critical for survival.
Multi-touch technology, which has already become mainstream in consumer devices, will infiltrate retail and business environments so extensively that it will become expected.
Improved hardware and connectivity will help mobile make the final transition into cloud-based data that allows the user to learn the world around her in real time.
Agile and iterative Web development will open new doors for innovation by allowing developers to innovate and adjust products based on immediate customer feedback.
Starbucks is testing their new iPhone app that lets you pay using just the Starbucks Card Mobile app on your iPhone/iPod touch. Just enter your card number and your device will display a barcode you can use the same way as your Starbucks Card to make a purchase.
The app is currently being tested in Starbucks stores located in Seattle, WA, Cupertino, CA and Mountain View, CA, conveniently, the homes of digital powerhouses Microsoft, Apple and Google, respectively.
This app is an example of a revolutionary convergence between your wallet and smart phone. As well as a brand intersecting technology to shape consumer loyalty programs. Now the stage is set for Starbucks to employ an innovative digital couponing program. Stay Tuned.
This is a great product innovation from Orange and Gotwind that ‘harnesses kinetic energy and a foot pump’ to power your mobile whilst you’re say..er… at Glastonbury, or just away from a socket.
Now all they have to do is a) find away that you can get a signal when you are in the arse end of nowhere and b) stop some soap dodging thief from having a rummage in your tent. Then all my festival problems have been solved. Apart from the toilet one. Found via Treehugger
Microsoft has released its answer to QR Codes and Data Matrixes with the appropriately named Microsoft Tag.
Using colours and shape-orientation, the tags are designed to display more information in a smaller place, as well as work when out of focus, which works a lot better with mobile devices where the focal distance is fixed.
Readers for many mobile phones (including the iPhone!) have been released and can be downloaded by browsing to http://gettag.mobi on your mobile device.
I was very impressed with how well it worked on my iPhone. I’ve tried lots of QR/Data Matrix readers out but the poor quality of the camera in the iPhone has always let me down. The Tag worked without a hitch.
They’re still in beta, so no word on if there will eventually be a cost to use these.
The N97 Finally announced to come into the market is the new phone to challenge the Apple iphone.
Below is the N97’s full list of talents as defined by Nokia.
The N97 has a full kick-out QWERTY keyboard, hidden behind a 3.5-inch widescreen 16:9 touch display that tilts smartly above the keys. Both control methods neatly coexist and are tailored to ensure every experience, be it messaging, social, entertainment-focussed or otherwise, are manageable via the most instinctive physical tool set available. The touchscreen promises to be exploited to full effect, even when inactive, courtesy of a new home screen that automatically sucks in live information via custom widgets sat on a S60 5th Edition backbone.
The N97 enters the fray stomaching 32GB of on-board storage, double that of any mobile device currently in existence, and can take up to another 16GB via microSD, enabling it to become a portable multi-media computer with 48GB in your pocket. Of course Nokia wants you to abuse this space with music, movies, photos and N-Gage games, and as such has worked hard to ensure the N97’s battery is up to the task – it promises to kick out up to 37 hours of music and 4.5 hours of video.
Embracing location based services and the concept of context awareness, the N97 is location-savvy, automatically sensing where it is at any given time via A-GPS. The benefit being that you’ll be able to tap into local services with ease and share your social location with friends minus any extra fiddling or fuss.
Other key talents include a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens and dual LED flash, GPS, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, USB 2.0, stereo Bluetooth and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
It will cost 550 Euros (before taxes and subsidies) when it launches in the first half of 2009. What do you think? Watch the video and leave your comments.
I’m holding off getting my new all singing, all dancing phone until I know a) which one is actually going to be the best and b) when an acceptable deal comes along that doesn’t make me feel like I’m getting ripped off.
The fact that we don’t get the latest handsets straight away, there’s no unlimited data plans and they love 24 month contracts in Aus doesn’t actually help much on either account. But when I see things like this I’m optimistic that I’m doing the right thing and not jumping on the iPhone band wagon.
It’s an augmented reality app for the android. Wikitude, developed by Mobilizy is a…”AR travel guide with functionality based on Wikipedia and Panoramio. You search landmarks in your surroundings and view them on a map, list, and on an augmented reality (AR) camera view. You’ll see an annotated landscape, mountain names, landmark descriptions”.
Vlingo the innovator in voice recognition for the Yahoo Mobile Onesearch has recently launched a new beta giving BlackBerry smart phone users control over mobile information and tasks with the power of their voice. Vlingo is currently a free download and available on the BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, & 88xx series.
Bottom line you can send a friend a text message without typing. Just speak, verify and send. Basically your phone figures out what you want, finds it and shows you how to get there. No tapping, no thumbs, just good old speaking which is suitable to avoid the no text/driving laws.
Furthermore here is what Vlingo can do…
Send and reply to emails and text messages
Search the Web
Dial the phone
Look up contacts
Send a “note to self”
Voice updates to Facebook & Twitter status updates
Tell A Friend
Read-back of the full text or email message that was spoken
The ability to launch built in programs:
Address Book
Alarm
BrickBreaker
Calculator
Calendar
Camera
Maps
Media
MemoPad
Messages
Options
Tasks
The ability to launch third party programs:
Facebook
Google Maps
Opera
Viigo
Over the next few quarters we are looking to see added support for Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Palm devices over time, on separate schedules.
Google’s personalized home page, iGoogle, is getting an update this Friday. Widgets on the page can support a new “canvas view,” which expands the widget to the full iGoogle window.
The new iGoogle also moves user navigation from tabs at the top of the page to a bar down the left side. This enables more pages and elements in the navigation, and I found that it made navigating iGoogle faster, since it provided a de facto table of contents for each page.
Like many of Google’s services, iGoogle is platform-aware. On a mobile phone, like on an iPhone or Android phone, when you log in to iGoogle, you’ll get a view of your page suited to the constraints of the device.
Rather than be tied down to any one carrier, why not keep changing carriers in real time based on whomever’s going to give you the best deal?
A new patent filed by Mountain View’s finest proposes exactly that, bringing together heterogeneous technologies — "community-wide" networks like WiFi and WiMAX along with GSM, CDMA, and so on — and an "auction system" that would let the user select (or allow the phone to automatically select) the best deal at the moment depending on their needs (available features or minimum speeds, time limits, and so on).
I doubt it will ever be released but the idea is brilliant.
Virgin do more than just care about their customers, they love them. They love them so much they want to help them in any way, in any situation. They have an SOS service which gets you out of a sticky situation, when you need help the most.
Stuck in a disastrous date? Small talk and uncomfortable silences galore? Wish you were anywhere but there? Don’t want to make a scene? Fear not – now you can dial 767 (SOS) and hang up without saying a word and then Virgin Mobile will call you back a minute later with a perfect excuse to get you out of there. We’ll even talk you through what to say.
At Razorfish globally we have been exploring NFC for a long time. Just look at the examples that we released in the past: The NFC gumball machine, BrandTable or Razorfish Digital Wallet.
Posted by stephanlange 
Amnesia Blog 
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