Category Archives: NFC

Passbook cleverness

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Trying wifi on American airlines for the first time somewhere over Arizona. Anyway I was excited to see Apple’s passbook launch as part of ios6. Great little feature to the iPhone and starts to help our little mobile assistant become even more key to our lives. I see the convenience and simplicity approach as a great killer application for the iPhone.

I’m going to check out the api capability and see how we can start to build features directly in to passbook. It looks pretty straight forward. I love the way we can trigger your data/functionality to be accessed and pushed at the user, based on location, calendar event or time. It’s great for the obvious such as flight bookings and coupon based activity. But we are more excited about the possibility for retail and event based promotions.

Going to do some digging.

Really keen to see where Apple go next. I.e. NFC integration. I love the approach with QR codes I.e. flight boarding passes but surely NFC in the next iPhone is going to be a real killer.

Will report back once we’ve done some prototyping.

Really excited about retail with this one.

Near field communication, can it make life more convenient?

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I’ve been looking into near field communication and possible applications for it.

Its and interesting technology and there is certainly lots of application ideas for it. Obviously the biggest break through will be a move to cashless society using your mobile phone to pay for things with a simple swipe of a sensor. Oyster cards and ticketing are also a logical route especially for people like me who keep loosing their Oyster cards. But there are lots of other applications which will make life simple and convenient.

I’ve been working with NFC with my new blackberry. I’ve just taken delivery of my first batch of sticky sensors. First thing I wanted to do is stick one on my desk. I wanted my out of office and other services such as social network status to change their status when I arrived at work. It proved really easy a simple swipe and my app did the rest. It switched my out of office off and the checked me in on facebook.

Next the car. One sticker on the dashboard, out of site, mind. One swipe. The phone was configured to turn its bluetooth on and switch off the bleeps from my email to save it catching my attention whilst driving.

Saved one sticker for home. Obviously the house isn’t fully automated but I could update some settings. Much more work here.

I guess when you start thinking about convenience and applications there are a lot of things you can use the technology for. Think about it being rolled into all your favourite shops, in the packaging of product, advertising boards, hotel checkins, door entry, flight boarding, immigration, business card exchange, time keeping systems and many more such instances.

Roll on iphone 5 we need to start building apps now.