Samsung, one of the largest vendors of NFC-enabled mobile phones, unveils their new ‘Wallet’ app: When we asked why Samsung did not include NFC tap-to-pay features in Wallet, the company said that retailers prefer barcodes over NFC because they don’t have to install any new infrastructure to support it. The failure of NFC adoption summed [...]
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From ubicomp to service design
Mike Kuniavsky presented at ETech 2009 on the Dotted-Line World on the links between ubiquitous computing and service design, where subscription-based services are based on everyday objects. (I’m a big fan of dotted or dashed lines, it’s a great visual trick for representing hidden things. Glad to see that Mike is taking up this language, [...]
Lightweight, parasitic services
Touch and travel is a German pilot scheme (one of many) that is testing NFC for ticketing on public transport. One of the partners in the trial Giesecke and Devrient describe it: “With the new eTicketing System Touch&Travel from Deutsche Bahn (DB), the mobile phone serves as an electronic ticket on trains, buses, streetcars, subways, [...]
‘Touch orders’ with ‘RFID dongles’
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 [...]
Mobile payment demo
The near-future success of NFC depends on the usability of mobile payments and ticketing. As interaction designers we of course argue that the success hinges on good design of this experience and recent news suggests that there is little to recommend mobile payments unless they offer some useful new features (see Place and product based [...]
Connected products
This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating. RFID may begin to enable cheap – even disposable – products that have identities and connections to a network. What are the opportunities for integrating services, infrastructure, community and online brands into physical objects? In the longer-term, how does the [...]
Local applications and services
This is a design brief, one of many themes that the Touch project is investigating. One of the most important features of NFC is that it only works at a very short range. This ties our interactions to particular places or objects, and forces us to design applications or services that work on a local [...]