I happened to catch the American-centric documentary history of the mobile phone called The Cellphone Revolution yesterday.

The most compelling content was the early visualisations of cellular networks, made by Motorola and AT&T at the time that they were trying to convince the FCC that mobile telephony was important.

It also features rather nice footage and [...]

On April 15th Nokia announced the 6212 ‘classic’ phone that incorporates Near Field Communication technology. This phone is the fourth NFC-capable phone from Nokia in as many years and it is the first NFC device that supports 3G data connections.

This is a simple ‘classic’ or ‘candybar’ design like the earliest NFC models. Nokia has a [...]

The weblog ‘Putting people first’ links to three interesting papers from CHI 2008 on mobile payments.
From meiwaku to tokushita!
Lessons for digital money design from Japan. Mainwaring, S., March, W., and Maurer, B. 2008. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

“As an example of ubiquitous computing in the [...]

The Green Touch installation at DOTT07 in Newcastle that we created with Helsinki-based Thinglink was a great success. There are a few photos of the event from Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. The local newspaper Evening Chronicle wrote a story on the exhibition:

Expect a write-up of the experience soon.

In collaboration with Helsinki-based development project Social Objects we have developed an installation called Green Touch. The exhibition encourage visitors to touch the design objects on display with mobile devices, in order to explore different aspects of their making, production and impact.
Green Touch builds upon Thinglink that socially connects and creates information surrounding products, [...]

A while ago some interesting projects attached passive RFID tags to ordinary mobile phones to enable participation within RFID-based ticketing, payment or infrastructure.
I wrote about this way of retro-fitting mobile phones with RFID. Simply attaching passive RFID tags to mobile handsets allows new functions to be added without integration into the phone itself. This [...]

The rhetoric of ‘mobile life’ is that technology will make motion more possible, easier, and that having access to information will make our lives easier, transcending time and space. This spectacular notion of global mobility has been around since the mobile phone became an essential business tool. Indeed mobile telephony, mostly voice and SMS has [...]

Another video demonstrating NFC technology. Look past the promotional spin and there are a lot of interesting clips of various NFC technologies in use.

Felica is developed by Sony and is compatible with NFC standards.