Ask HN: Would you use an NFC PaaS (easy solution for real world analytics)?
I am part of a new company in the NFC space - for those unfamiliar, NFC is a way to uniquely identify things in the real world using rfid.
We have not launched & are considering options for product development. One of them is becoming a PaaS company.
So, the platform would be a service that allows you to get our NFC cards, a reader (android app or a small hardware device) & a web api to those cards. We would do things like store all of your cards checkins/scans & push checkins/scans to your server if you'd like as well as provide analytics via interface & api. Additionally, we would provide example code for reading tags / integrating api in several languages. In essence, we're like a Twilio of real world tracking/analytics.
For clarity sake, here are a few possible use cases:
1. The automagic wakeboarding photos (or video) app - Imagine you have a cable ski park, you could stick an NFC strips on the bottom of your wakeboard & one of our waterproof terminals at the base of a ramp that will notify your service in which you could activate a camera & snap a photo (or video) of the person ski-ing & send them emails with all of their photos from their ski session.
2. The single loyalty card for every restaurant ever - Imagine you'd like to be a rewards company that gives you a loyalty card that provides rewards at every restaurant registered with your service. You could order our NFC cards (or stickers if you want people to stick them on the back of their drivers license) & distribute them to your restaurants to give out or give them out yourself. Your members can now swipe/tap & get rewards anywhere.
3. The supermarket tabulation app - If you could work your way into wholefoods & replace every shelf price sticker with an NFC sticker you could have people go through the store & scan each item/quantity they plan on buying (using their android/nfc enabled phone) & get a running total of their grocery bill (or perhaps find deals for similar items?)
4. The realtime wallet & keys app - Imagine a phone app that consistently checks for the presence of your keys & wallet. You just slip one of our NFC tags on your keychain & card in your wallet & never worry about losing them again because your phone will log your location & alert you when they (your keys/wallet) are not close to it (your phone) for more than X seconds or minutes.
5. An improved security system - Security would no longer have to be decentralized, you could now see live checkins in a given building using our API.
6. A real world 4square/Gowalla - If you could outfit locations with our hardware you could very simply create a more automatic check-in service.
The point is, we think the possibilities are endless & were wondering if the development community would be interested in using a service like this. Pricing would likely be a few cents per scan (we're thinking .02-.04).
Any feedback or interest is welcome & the founders are here to answer any questions you may have!
p.s. What applications would you have in mind for something like this? We're definitely interested in how other people would want to use our tech/api!