Design Article
Mobile apps get smarter using NFC
Junko Yoshida, Anne-Francoise Pele
11/8/2012 1:00 PM EST
PARIS – Cartes, the annual conference on smart card technology, has morphed into a showcase for technologies and products that combine smart security, electronic payments and identification with mobility.
This year's conference expanded to include RFID and near-field communications (NFC) technologies broadly adopted in passports, national IDs and mass transit along with gaming, consumer electronics, retail, health care and advertising.
The adoption of NFC in smartphones is also expanding technology applications far beyond mobile payments. These range from peer-to-peer applications to personalization of profile settings and new reader/writer apps.
Chip manufacturers pitching their RFID and NFC technologies along with secure MCUs include: NXP Semiconductors, STMicroelectronics, Infineon Technologies and Freescale Semiconductor.
In the following pages, we offer snapshots of the latest NFC apps already on the market and new ones introduced at Cartes 2012:
Book publishing with embedded NFC chips: The first book embedded with multiple NFC chips. Using a smartphone as a reader, NFC chips inside the book allow the reader to connect to the Internet, download a song and watch video clips.
Next: NFC and video gaming
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agk
11/9/2012 5:19 AM EST
Many times at the public places we miss to watch our kith,kins,relatives,friends who are also near by. Usually one of us see the other and in their next meet we discuss about this. So if this near field communication if it can be improved with a little more distance then we may have our phones giving a pleasant meeting reminders.
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junko.yoshida
11/9/2012 11:34 AM EST
How far and wide NFC apps have already spread is a truly amazing story in my opinion. RFID tags became a big story when Walmart first announced its intention to use it to replace bar codes -- which in the end dind't really happen in a big way. But NFC is another story. The industry is finding a lot of imaginative applications and we are only seeing just the tip of the iceberg.
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GREAT-Terry
11/12/2012 4:44 AM EST
NFC applications are so nice that I think Samsung and Android phones are now embracing the right technology to expand the functionality of smartphone to endless imagination. Apple, on the other hand, looks down at this fascinating technology so I wonder if Apple will be out of our eyesight in 3 to 5 years (provided they keep on just improving processors but putting everything in more or less look alike chassises)
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chanj
11/12/2012 2:38 PM EST
Cost is the main factor. Barcode and magnetic card are lower cost than NFC. What are the values of NFC bringing on the table given Google has been using bar code to do eWallet?
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junko.yoshida
11/12/2012 5:32 PM EST
I think things like peer-to-peer pairing, "secure" transaction, and the ability for users to program what they want their NFC stickers to do are a few good examples NFC do better than barcodes.
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