Sound Based Near Field Communication without NFC Chips | Hacker News Reader

Sound Based Near Field Communication without NFC Chips

pcworld.com

13 pointssunsu7 comments

My girlfriend's heart rate monitor uses a similar technology to transmit her heart rate data to her computer. It's a neat idea, but it also leaves me skeptical that such an idea would work well for purchases...

We built an image-through-sound sharing app at IPO48 hackathon this february - one of mentors there was trying to convince us to upscale that from funny entartainment utility to an e-commerce, but we didn't see a business oportunity... Our bad :)

If you are interested, see our demo Android app at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElkmzoqD9PM (or search Soundwise on Android market).

Tomas Kafka from MobReactor

I wonder what the maximum bitrate is, NFC is already pretty slow. Can you get a stable 9600 baud with cellphone speakers and microphones?

It's actually not very flexible. I've seen field trials of this. It is an interesting concept but not very implementable.

You could do the same data transfer by having the phone display a barcode and use a barcode scanner.

They claim that outfitting an existing system with an NFC reader costs $100 to $800. Which is not true. An NFC dongle is under $20. They are looking at costs of NFC stand alone terminals (w/ LCD display, etc.) and that high cost is due to secure element and certifications those have to go through to work w/ Visa/Mastercard networks.

It is an interesting technology and has its uses but not as an NFC replacement.

At a guess, you could probably get a few kbits.

But you really would get better results for video. Just using some round numbers from QR codes for an example, 33 px * 33 px * 15 Hz = 16 kbit, which is much more even allowing for the metadata overhead and an error-correcting protocol.

What's really cool about Zoosh is what it does for p2p or m2m behavior.

Also, I thought Shopkick would have locked up these patents?

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