NFC Stickers Make Smartphones Smarter
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
I think I know what my Dad felt like when he got his first label printer... Within days it seemed like every object in his office was labeled...
I've got a tag in my car to automatically send my wife a "Headed home" SMS, a tag on my night stand to toggle between 'night' (silent) and 'day' (loud) volume settings, a tag by my back door to launch CardioTrainer when I go out for a run (this one may have crossed the "I've run out of ideas" line...). I'm using the keychain tag to dial a response number for the fire department I'm a member of.
And profile switching is just the basics. You can have a tag that connects guests' NFC-enabled phones to your wifi without having to hand out the password, for instance.
NFC task launcher + tasker is an amazing combination that opens up all kinds of possibilities.
The interesting thing is going to be whether Apple decides to invent their own standard here. I fully expect them to pull a facetime and make something that is entirely based on but completely incompatible with NFC. And I fully expect that it will dominate and force everybody else to rework their solutions. And as obnoxious as I think this behaviour is, I wish they would just get on with it so we can get through it and actually start using NFC type functionality, Apple designed or otherwise.
The thing to keep in mind here is that NFC requires interoperability to be useful. Not only that, but Sony and NXPI (Philips' semiconductor spin out) own all the related NFC intellectual property (NXPI supplies the IC in the Nexus NFC-enabled phone). So, Apple is free to innovate at a UX level, but the low-level implementation will be based on the NXPI ASIC.
You could say the same thing about facetime, iMessage or airplay or other things Apple has released. Apple seems to be quite satisfied with improving the experience of people who live only in their ecosystem while leaving others out, even at times to their own detriment. I think they have enough power to pull off exclusive deals with enough financial institutions and retailers to get their own tech deployed into a lot of stores. So I don't really buy that they can't go their own way on this.
Again, I keep hoping I'm wrong and that there are other RFID/NFC contact-less asymmetric encryption options out there that I'm unaware of (please tell me!), but after buying some encrypted tags and finding out that they're still vulnerable to some easy attacks I lost short term interest.
(Of course active<->active NFC is still interesting. I invision a future house with a secret NFC panel that does asym auth with my phone to unlock itself with a batman style swing-open door).
I've been watching and tinkering with NFC for sometime. It gets boring quickly because you can't have cheap fobs that are secure yet because there's no way to do assymmetric encryption without an active NFC (with power).
Thus, your "car openers" that use NFC fobs are open to be cloned, and in fact was just recently a source of BMW theft. With the ability to have RNGs and assymmetric encryption, you can have usable, secure fobs.
It's important to note that originally the key difference between NFC and RFID was that the NFC-enabled phone was supposed to be able to fall back to power-less operation (inductive coupling) when the phone ran out of juice.