Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

Not meaning anyone is promoting NFC on posters. I’m rather meaning the NFC Smart Poster Specification.

Actually it’s remarkably quiet about the technology that is intended to turn mobile phones into wallets and ID cards. Also, how many phones have you seen in USA or Europe with NFC?

As most of you know (no? really?) NFC is based on RFID, as in Radio Frequency Identification, but could be said to be a narrowing in terms of radio frequencies and distance, yet an extension in terms of use cases for primarily mobile phones. While RFID now supports numerous different frequencies and longer distance transfers (like 10 meters or so, best case), NFC is specifically geared towards very short distance transfers, like a few centimeters, to avoid eavesdropping (at least in theory) and make device discovery simple (a major problem with Bluetooth, if used for the same types of applications).

To enable the wallet and ID card functionality the NFC component is generally put in the SIM card, that is essentially a Smart Card. That way providing a closed “block” that can’t be tampered with to falsify identity, provided of course your phone is not stolen.

Smart Poster enables actual posters containing NFC tags to convey messages to services, e.g. for rebates. It’s really very simple: The tag can contain information (typically a keyword for addressing the service and associated service parameters) and a destination number, that will be sent as an SMS. The tag can also contain information for accessing the service via the phone’s browser. In both cases the tag houses all this information in a URL, even for SMS transfer. Developing services for Smart Poster is therefore very simple too, similar to handling inbound SMS’s that users have written themselves, or like handling service-to-service queries via HTTP.

The question is when NFC will reach critical mass. It will take years.

NFC Forum – Specification Download

Posted by Anders Borg 22:14 | Permalink