Tagged: Mobile

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NFC is not just mobile payment

NFC or Near Field Communication is the big buzz word at the moment and everybody is talking about it. The truth is that the technology is nothing new and it has been around for a long time. Nokia had an NFC enabled phone in 2007, it was called the Nokia 6131.

Google has made the term mainstream with their announcement of Google Wallet and most people think of NFC as a way to pay with their mobile device. But that is not all.

imageAt Razorfish globally we have been exploring NFC for a long time. Just look at the examples that we released in the past: The NFC gumball machine, BrandTable or Razorfish Digital Wallet.

We actually have a wall of NFC to showcase all kinds of uses for the technology right in our office.

So what else can you do with NFC apart from using it for payments?

There are already plenty of examples out there.

Below you can find 6 examples on how NFC can be used right now.

1. Use your NFC enabled phone as the key to your hotel room

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For the recent Olympics in London a Holiday Inn Hotel gave their VIP customers a Samsung Galaxy S3 as part of their 40 VIP rooms. The guests were able to check in and out of the hotel, as well as change the AC, control the TV, and unlock their rooms with the phone.

Using NFC in your phone as a key to open doors has been used in the Enterprise world as well. The phones were used to enable physical access systems in buildings and track employee time-clock check-ins and attendance, access staff parking areas or cafeterias and pay for services.

NFC tags could be placed inside meeting or conference rooms, and attendees could tap their compatible devices to silence them or to turn on Wi-Fi, for example.

2. Use it as your travel pass

Continue reading

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Nokias future phone looks like a teardrop

we have seen how Nokia wants to bend the future of phones with flexible displays and now Nokias future lab showed us a concept video on how it could all work together.

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nanotechnology, with a bendable transparent display and a fully touch sensitive casing are only some of the visions that Nokia cooked up.

Check out the video:

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not sure if I agree with all of it, but there are some nice ideas in it.

@maniac13

Nokia Launches New NFC-Enabled Games

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It’s great to see some fun uses for NFC trickling through. It’s taken a while though, with Nokias’ first NFC enabled hand set having hit the market in 2006

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication#NFC-enabled_handsets

Nokia have also launched an NFC microsite recently which does a good job at explaining what’s possible:

http://europe.nokia.com/nfc

Other NFC references:

NFC trials in the world

http://www.nfcworld.com/list-of-nfc-trials-pilots-tests-and-commercial-services-around-the-world/

cute little story about a small town in Finland

http://www.nfcworld.com/2008/10/28/397/oulu-the-little-city-with-big-ideas/

Visa mobile payment trials in Finland in 2009

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/read/visa-trials-mobile-payments-in-finland/07589

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The Future of Shopping: Some Retail Stores will probably look like this:

The success of Tesco’s new retail store in Korea is something to behold:

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Why? Because there is no physical store and no physical product. However the experience of the store has been fully recreated two dimensionally as a backlit poster with the products and ordering fulfilled using mobile and QR codes. It’s a neat idea and solves a number of issues:

1. The familiar supermarket experience. Tick!
2. Impulse shopping. Tick!
3. Cheap rent. Tick!
4. Open a new store in high traffic areas in one day. Tick!
5. No internal fit out costs. Tick!
6. No need to stock shelves Tick!
7. No Staff wages. Tick!
8. Open 24hrs. Tick!
The list goes on.

Personally I’d like to see NFC integration as well as QR codes. I think we can also expect to see these walls become screens rather than printed products in the very near future.

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the camera of the future

you might have seen this already, but I somehow missed it in my post here.

I was send the video at the bottom of this post and it blew my mind. Looks like there was a working version of it at CES this year.

This camera (concept) takes the connectivity and application platform capabilities of today’s smart phones and wirelessly connects them with interchangeable full SLR-quality optics.

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Check out the video:

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their site promises some awesome specs:

BODY

Aluminum and magnesium alloy
Docked display and frame unit Display unit: 127 x 69 x 7.5mm
Frame unit: 164.5 x 76.5 x 28.2 mm

DISPLAY UNIT

5.0" AMOLED display
Viewing area: 110 x 61.9 mm
1920x 1080 pixels
(2,073,600 dots, 16:9)
Cortex-A15 ARM Multi-Core CPU
16GB embedded + microSDHC

ANTENNAS

802.11n
GPS
Bluetooth 2.0
WirelessHD

CONTINUOUS SHOOTING
BUFFER

Approximately 10 fps
20 images (lens detached)
180 images (lens attached)
5 RAW (lens detached)
40 RAW (lens attached)

I am hoping they are going to build this thing and ship it really fast, because I want one.

@maniac13

Legally stream (almost) all the music you want in Australia – for free.

We all like music, right? I mean, some of us profess to enjoy it more properly, appropriately or adequately than others – this here Superior Hipster for example:

…but when you get down to it, pretty much everybody likes it.

So, we all want more of it, right? Thus the dawn and success of the iPod, and various other MP3 players. We could carry our thousands of tunes with us everywhere we went, beautiful.

Read on through my rambles to find out what I think the best music streaming service available to Australians is (so far). Continue reading

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The mobile phone of the future

and no, it’s not an iPhone.

This is a concept mobile phone of the future that was put together by Billy May. He gathered community feedback and followed up on some rather mundane visions for the mobile future to bring us the Mozilla Seabird.

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The big innovation is the use of dual pico projectors on the side of the handset, which can provide different functionality based on the phone’s orientation: flat on a table they pump out the two halves of a QWERTY keyboard, up on a dock they offer the dual purpose of a large viewing screen above and a seamless projected keyboard below. Other features, like the pop-out wireless pointer / Bluetooth headset are slightly less realistic but no less charming.

unfortunately Mozilla is not planning on building this phone (or any other phone for that matter)

But check out the video – what I like is that it runs Android, but when you dock it it runs Windows 7 – nice!

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simply put – I want one!

@maniac13

SMSlingshot

WOW

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SMSlingshot is an autonom working device, equipped with a high frequency radio, hacked arduino board, laser and batteries. Text messages can be typed on a phone-sized wooden keypad which is integrated in an also wooden slingshot. After the message is finished, the user can aim on a media facade and send/shoot the message straight to the targeted point. It will then appear as a coloured splash with the message written within. The text message will also be real-time twittered – just in case.

@handypearce

Mashable's iPad 3G Review: for Australians and Lazy People

Mashable have a really fantastic review of the 3G incarnation of the iPad – it’s a bit long though, so I’m going to shorten it down to only the necessary information (for lazy people) and throw an Australian perspective in at the end to balance out their US-centric complaints.

Find the review summary, and Australian perspective after the jump. Continue reading

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Microsofts new touchscreen mobiles are all about being social with your friends

Microsoft today launched its new series of touchscreen mobile smartphones called Kin.

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There is a 4GB and an 8GB version with 5 and 8 Megapixel cameras with flash, capable of HD video and both models focus heavily on all your social networks, e.g. Twitter and facebook.

It seems that these phones are targeted at 18 to 35 year olds.

check out the video here

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not the phone I am going to go for, but impressive to see how MS is putting all its eggs into social networking.

@maniac13