The Internet of Things
September 17th, 2008 | by Jose Miguel Cansado |Near Field Communication (NFC) is a wireless technology that enables communication between devices over very short distances (less than 10 cm). The technology has been available for a while in the form of contactless (or proximity) cards that are mainly used for public transportation and payment. One of the most successful implementations is the Suica card, widely used in Japan for railways and micropayments in convenience stores. Japanese usually store the card in their wallets and just pass the whole wallet over the card reader when they enter and exit railway extensions. Credit is automatically deducted depending on the itinerary.
The Suica card is so popular that Japanese handset vendors embedded NFC devices in wallet phones compatible with the system on which Suica is based (Sony’s Felica). This enables people to use their handsets as a Suica card for railways and micropayments, with the additional feature that the card balance is recharged from the phone account.
Now Tikitag, an Alcatel-Lucent Venture, is making NFC technology available to developers and users to link real world objects to the online world. See the clip below for Tikitag presentation at DEMO Fall 08.
As NFC-enabled phones become available in volumes (some analysts predict 250 million NFC phones by 2012), there is huge potential for applications around NFC.
The simplest application is to associate an URL to an NFC tag. These inexpensive tags can be attached to any object, like posters, business cards, a laptop, a car, etc. When a NFC phone touches the tag, the browser will open and it will be redirected to the URL associated witht the tag. This way you can associate your online profiles (Facebook, LinkedIn or any personal page) to you business card. Advertisers can attach a tag to posters or even to goods so that anyone can access to online information, ticketing or customer care just by a single touch. A museum can add a tag close to each art work, so that an online multimedia guide can pop up in your handset, when “touching” the tag with your phone.
Any online action can be associated to a tag, which open the door to more sophisticated applications, either standalone or integrated with existing ones.
