Poken is offering a physical networking platform, with physical, RFID-based objects that plug into a PC via USB (where have we heard that before?)

A Poken is a connected business card, when you meet people you want to connect to, you touch their ‘poken’ and get added to their Open Social network.

Just tap your poken to [...]

A Dutch company, Swinxs is developing a physical RFID-based console with RFID wristbands for children. They claim to be encouraging physical activities and ‘stimulating imagination’.

The console includes versions of Tag, multiple Quiz games, Hide and Seek and Charades. The base-station connects to the internet for uploading scores and downloading content.

The movie on their home page [...]

Rob van Kranenburg is creating what looks like an interesting critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID:

“The Internet of Things is the second issue in the series of Network Notebooks. Rob van Kranenburg examines what impact RFID, and other systems, will have on our cities and our wider society.”
Edit The [...]

Plug and play RFID-reading USB peripherals are all the rage, as indicated by a stream of recent product announcements. These readers plug into a PC and make various things happen when they are touched with an RFID tag.
RFID readers are small and cheap, encapsulating them in packaging and offering a standard USB interface makes for [...]

I’m happy to say that with great contributions from Nicolas Nova, Matt Jones and many others, the pool of images of ‘touch interfaces’ on Flickr is growing nicely. I originally asked for contributions in February 2005, and the pool has been growing steadily ever since.

This collection of ‘vernacular’ designs for RFID-based interfaces is extremely [...]

From the Picnic conference last year, Mediamatic’s ‘RFID safe’ which protects your wireless RFID cards from being read or ‘skimmed’. With Mifare security problems a reality, and the ability to skim cards such as the Oyster fairly easily, I wonder how common these things will become?

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Anti Skimming Devices Highly Recommended for This Year’s Mother’s Day [...]

At last year’s Picnic conference we created a networked Photo Booth as part of the Mediamatic RFID hackers camp. Picnic is a conference with about two thousand attendees and multiple venues in the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam.
One of the aims of the Mediamatic workshop was to experiment with ubiquitous technology for social and playful purposes. [...]

While thinking about radio-field-based interactions and the gestures that they entail I’m reminded of this quote by Adam in Everyware:

“If you really want to know what information processing dissolving in behaviour really looks like, catch the way women swing their handbags across the Octopus readers at the turnstiles of the Mong Kok subway station; there’s [...]