By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
4/8/2008
The NFC Forum, an industry organization formed to advance the use of near-field communication technology, has announced the finalists in a competition it is hosting that is designed to show the cutting edge innovations that may well become the future of what NFC can do and how it can be used. You can read all about the competition and the finalists at the NFC Forum website on the topic. What amazed me about the list of finalists was that there are so many of them with retail or retail-related applications – and there are even a few contenders from the US, long the step-child when it comes to mobile phone innovations.
To expand just a bit on what this is all about, near-field communications is basically a fancy name for that loaded term “RFID”, except that the applications are for the use of specific frequencies that are only good for very short distances – hence, why the credit card industry uses NFC rather than RFID when talking about smart card applications. The biggest push, and why when you look at the NFC Forum’s sponsoring members you’ll find the likes of Nokia and NTT among other mobile-related companies, is to get NFC chips embedded in phones. If you manage to accomplish that, the opportunities are endless – from payments to basic marketing, to peer-to-peer interactions. When I talk about mobile serving as the link between the physical world and the virtual world, NFC makes the physical side of the link very, very easy.
So the NFC Forum has launched a competition to make that boundless opportunity a little easier to grasp, by calling for both commercial and research-oriented submissions. They announced the finalists last week, and the winners will be announced at the WIMA event (a conference in Europe focusing on wireless technologies) on April 29th. I don’t get to vote, so I’ll highlight here my top 3 favorites (in no particular order), along with a take on the retail applications:
- Touch & Interact: Applied to a Tourist Guide Prototype, submitted by Lancaster University, UK. At first it doesn’t sound all that different from any touch screen – you use your NFC-enabled phone to interact with a full-size public display screen, much like a touch screen, except instead of your hand, you’re using your phone. But here’s where it gets interesting: as much as the phone controls what’s shown on the screen, the screen can control what gets shown on your phone. In the tourist guide situation, you might request directions, and the big screen shows a map with your route highlighted. On your phone, it would show the step by step instructions that are more suited for the phone’s display. Or, as Lancaster University suggests, the large screen may show public information while the small screen – your phone – shows private information. This has huge implications for retail, where privacy concerns are a hot topic. For example, enable a consumer to use a phone to navigate a web site on a large screen, but show the purchase confirmation or loyalty points balance, etc. just on that person’s mobile phone – that is extremely powerful.
- Smart Doorbell, submitted by the University of Applied Sciences, Austria. Through a device at your door, and an NFC-enabled phone, someone approaching your house can wave their phone in front of the door and in effect announce their presence. Through a variety of methods, from computer to your own mobile phone, you could take an action based on who it is – either ignore them, unlock the door to let them in, or even call them directly. Because this routes through a server which can also be set up to automatically grant permissions (in effect, issuing “keys” to all the people who live in the house, or to guests temporarily or permanently), you can also log who has tried to enter. Aside from the boost to services businesses by allowing consumers to set up entrée into their house when they set up a home delivery appointment, the most obvious retail application to me would be for dressing rooms: a consumer can use the smart doorbell to either unlock a locked dressing room, or to summon help from an employee. Or, it could be used to grant access to premium spaces for high-value customers – like a lounge area or special dressing room. Starbucks could use it to provide access to self-service pay-per-use conference rooms (quiet spaces) for those dedicated third-space users – or such consumers could opt to redeem loyalty points for the use, now that Starbucks is rolling out a loyalty program.
- Remote Grocery Shopping via NFC, submitted by the University of Rome WLAB, Italy. I wouldn’t say that this concept is innovative – one of the first use-cases for promoting item-level RFID was the idea that it would help you maintain a grocery list at home. That was the whole “smart appliance” thing, where your refrigerator would remind you that you need more milk. Creepy appliance jokes aside, that was actually a pretty complicated vision – a smart appliance (or pantry), a smart product, and the networked applications to capture your grocery list – and how were you going to access that list once you decided to go shopping, anyway? Print it out and take it with you? The University of Rome adds the innovation by vastly simplifying the process. Instead of needing to upgrade your refrigerator, you use your mobile phone, and just scan items into your phone’s grocery list as you chuck out the old empty package. The concept is still way out there – because you need item-level RFID to make it work – but there are non-NFC ways to make this work too. What if you could take a picture of a barcode with your phone’s camera and have that product automatically added to your grocery list? With barcodes, the possibilities become far more far-reaching, because they don’t have to be tied exclusively to the physical product – you could have a barcode in a magazine that adds recipe ingredients to your phone list, for example.
The one thing that I can say about the prospects for NFC and retail is that this is all very exciting. I think it is inevitable that mobile phones will do so much more than they do for us today – and retailers better watch out, because if you thought online made a difference to how you operate, just wait until mobile phones are an active part of the mix – whether chip-enabled or not.
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