Author Archives: Hsuan-hua Chang

About Hsuan-hua Chang

Hsuan-hua has over 20 years of experience in wireless technology, holding many corporate positions ranging from software engineer, technical architect to product marketing manager. She is the author of “Everyday NFC” and is working on an update release of the book.

NFC Mobile Wallet and Incoming WIMA-USA Conference

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A friend called me from an AT&T store. “Hi. I want to buy a phone that does Google wallet, and I can’t get a straight answer from the sales person.” Apparently it is very confusing for consumers to know their options in selecting a phone that works with mobile wallet. Here is some information on this topic for curious minds.

Google wallet uses NFC technology. This is how it work.

  • User owns an NFC enabled Android phone.
  • User downloads a mobile wallet app from Google Play, an app store, to their phone.
  • User launches the app and enters credit card information to it.
  • User uses the phone to pay bills at stores that have NFC readers available.

Google wallet was released in 2011. The mobile phones sold in Verizon and T-mobile stores don’t support it because Verizon, T-mobile, and AT&T all invested into ISIS, a mobile wallet joint venture. ISIS was in trial in Salt Lake City and Austin in 2012 and will be rolled out nationally sometime in the near future. If you are interested in these topics, you might want to consider attending the WIMA-USA conference.

WIMA-USA NFC & Proximity Solutions conference will be held in San Francisco on Oct 28-30th. The conference will have a rich conversation about contactless communication including NFC, Bluetooth, and QR code. An Early Bird 20% discount on the Full Access Pass (1or 2 days) is available until September 13th using code: EBUS13.

This is the 3rd WIMA conference in USA and you can read about my WIMA NFC 2012 conference experience here.

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Big Data and NFC Mobile Payment

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Today, while I was finishing an online purchase, a window popped up on my screen to ask if I wanted a free purchase protection service from Google. (See screen shot at the end of the blog)

If I were regular online shopper, I might think, “How nice, why not to take advantage of the free protection?” However, being into Big Data, I see this as a smart attempt on behalf of Google to collect data. Currently Google collects a lot of information about their customers using Google search, Gmail, Google docs, maps and calendar. Offering free purchase protection gives them the opportunity to further develop their big data analysis by collecting information on online purchase.

In its recent blog, Google said if any information is stored in Google+, Gmail,  or Google calendar, it can instantly accessible through voice search. This information, which will be secured through encryption, includes information on flights, reservations, purchases, plans, and photos. This is how transparent our life. The more data we provide to a service provider, the more they can make our life easier. The cost, however, is that we have less privacy. For example, A Wall Street Journal article titled “NSA Reaches Deep Into U.S. To Spy on Net” reported yesterday that NSA systems have the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all US internet traffic.

When NFC mobile payment takes off, telecoms will own mobile purchase information. That data will enable them to understand their customers better. If I were a leader in the telecom industry, I would want to obtain clarity about what consumer mobile purchase data means to the bottom line of my business, to the lives of my consumers and to the whole ecosystem in order to generate the business intelligence that benefits all.

In the article “One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Big Data”, the author pointed out ” We have a long way to go to get rid of the mindset that data is all about marketing and advertising.” I trust innovation comes from this kind of awareness, sharing and discussion. What do you think?

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Develop an NFC Strategy Through Observing Cloud Adoption Trends

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NFC pioneers in the US have questions about the adoption rate of the technology and the partnership opportunities in the ecosystem.

The adoption trends of Cloud Computing perhaps provide some insight on this inquiry. Amazon started to offer Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006, Google added Google Docs to its Gmail offering in 2007, Microsoft launched Azure in 2009, and Apple announced iCloud in 2011.

James Staten of Forrester Research, shared recent trends from a survey on Cloud developers at the  RightScale Compute 2013 conference. The first trend is that developers seem to be lacking in experience with Cloud. The survey revealed that only 30% of developers had hands-on experience with the Cloud. Given the number of consumers utilizing the Cloud, this low percentage is surprising to me. For example, my laptop offers Acer Cloud, my iPad synchronizes with my iPhone through iCloud, and my Google calendar is in Google Cloud. Because these and other Cloud products are becoming more widely utilized, one can assume that a high percentage of the developers are using Cloud products. What could motivate these developers to create Cloud-based apps?

Another trend points to smaller organizations as leaders in Cloud innovation. The survey revealed that less than a quarter of Cloud developers are working for large enterprises. Finally the demographic of the survey itself revealed a trend that US’s adoption seems to lag behind that of other countries. Only a quarter of Cloud developers are in the US; the others are in Asia and Europe.

What can this tell us about NFC? A brief history shows some of the parallels. The first NFC enabled mobile phone was released by Nokia in 2006. Since then, quite a few NFC-enabled phones have come on the market, followed by the introduction of NFC-enabled tablets in 2012 and 2013. Asia and Europe have had a higher adoption rate of NFC, while in the US, consumers are not taking full advantage of the capability.

If you are one of the NFC pioneers in the US, will working with large enterprises present a good opportunity? Where can you make an impact as an educator of the technology? “What do we need to do together to make this work” as asked by James Staten.

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NFC in Action

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I was browsing YouTube and found a few interesting demonstrations the uses of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.  

NFC for Beginners by GeekBlogTV demonstrates how to use an NFC phone to communicate with tags that are programmed for specific functions. The demo uses an app (NFC Task Launcher) from GooglePlay to program tags in order to perform designated tasks.

Android Home Automation Demo | Voice + NFC demonstrates two technologies: one for speech recognition and one for NFC. Armando Ferreira places NFC tags in different areas and appliances in his house. When tags are requested to perform tasks by an NFC phone, the hands-off automation is demonstrated.

Android provides an NFC framework for app developers to develop NFC mobile apps. NFC Basics  describes the Android framework APIs that support NFC features. For example, the Android app NFC Task Launcher, such as the one used by GeekBlogTV, was developed with Android framework APIs (Application Programming Interface).

The Windows phone Proximity API provides support for NFC communication. In this YouTube video Lumia App Labs #8 – Developing NFC apps in Windows Phone 8, Andreas Jakl demonstrates how one can use Proximity API in a mobile app to communicate with NFC tags and create unique application-launch tags.

NFC and Big Data

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Near Field Communication (NFC) is a wireless connectivity technology. The key word here is “connectivity”. It is not rocket science; it is similar to WIFI or Bluetooth, the technologies that we are familiar with and widely use. NFC enables devices within short proximity (4 cm) to connect with each other in order to exchange information. It also enables devices to read and write from/to NFC tags in order to retrieve or distribute data.

The term WIFI was used commercially in 2000. I remember that in 2002, I used three long Ethernet cables in order to connect  my home computers to the internet. The next year, I bought a WIFI router and started taking advantage of wireless connectivity. Nowadays, when we go to Starbucks, we connect our laptops to the WIFI network and start browsing the web within seconds. The hardware (wireless adapter) and user interface make the connectivity so easy that we don’t even think of the underlying mechanism.

Bluetooth specifications were developed in 1994 and many products are using the technology now. In the tele-healthcare industry, Bluetooth enabled medical devices provide significant value to the consumer. For example, a patient can take a blood pressure reading with a Bluetooth device at home and a nurse can remotely monitor the readings through a server.

NFC is based on RFID technology. The first RFID patent was granted in 1983. The NFC Forum was established in 2004. In 2006, the first NFC-enabled phone was released by Nokia. Today, most newly released smart phones are NFC enabled; they have an NFC chip inside the phone that communicates with NFC tags or other NFC enabled phones, consumers know very little about this capability because of lacking of education.

With your NFC enabled phone,  you can tap your phone with a new friend’s NFC phone and exchange contact information upon agreement. That’s the simplicity of connectivity. This kind of data exchange will add more data into the Big Data realm.

Big data is a hot topic nowadays. Enterprises want to leverage it in order to serve their customers or to develop customer desired products. Whatever we say, write, connect to or exchange with; structured or unstructured data all are part of the Big Data. With the broad usage of mobile devices, big data can be collected easily with or without our permission. When combined with Cloud computing, Big Data analysis can be performed easily and create tremendous impacts to the businesses.

AWS Summit NYC 2012, Werner Vogel’s keynote shared how a drug designer used computational chemistry algorithms with 21 Million compounds to develop a medication that would treat cancer. A Cloud platform shortened the process time and operational expense while dealing with big data analysis.

NFC, like any other connectivity enabler data traffic, will provide useful information for businesses and provide value for consumers. Any business that is thinking of capturing NFC data will be ahead of the game. I believe when consumers start to adopt NFC, it will become part of our life.

NFC Tag and QR Code

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When I explained NFC tag to a friend, he replied, “I got it! It’s like QR code.” Spot-on. The concept is similar to QR code. QR code is popular enough for people to capture the concept. For those who aren’t sure what a QR code is, here is an example:Wikipedia_mobile_en

QR (Quick Response) code was created by a Toyota subsidiary in 1994 to track vehicles during manufacture. It became widely utilized worldwide in the last few years with the popularization of smart phones, which can be used as QR code scanners. For example: Front Flip is a mobile app that can be downloaded to an iPhone or Android phone to scan QR codes. Some restaurants place their QR code by the entrance of their stores. When customers scan it with Front Flip in their phones, they unlock a digital scratch-off card that provides a chance to win a discounted meal. This helps retaining customers. More than 30 such mobile loyalty apps have emerged in recent months [1].

The main difference between a QR code and an NFC tag is that NFC tags can be read by smart phones without an app. Today, most newly released smart phones are NFC enabled; they have an NFC chip inside the phone that communicates with NFC tags.

For example: Starbucks can embed an NFC tag in a poster promoting a new drink. When a customer taps his/her NFC phone to the tag, he/she gets a coupon for a discount. The customer can pass that coupon just by tapping his/her phone with a friend’s NFC phone. These are how NFC functions in open mode.

Cost-wise, the NFC tag is still much more expensive (around a dollar more) than QR code (which only costs pennies). The cost for NFC tags will drop as it becomes more widely adopted over time. Phone manufactures, telecoms, and service providers should educate their consumers about NFC devices in order to speed up the adoption rate.

ABI Research reported 102 million NFC handsets were shipped in 2012; 285M will ship in 2013 and 500M in 2014. NFC tablets and laptops have already been released. Sometimes, I wonder why telecoms can’t figure out how to promote NFC capability to their consumers when it’s so easy to demonstrate the advantage of using it and so many devices are available with the capability.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323689204578569382612115700.html?KEYWORDS=QR+code

NFC Tags Can Boost Your Product Sale

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I found an NFC App Development book, “NFC Application Development for Android” and decided to use the book as a guide to develop my NFC app. Since I didn’t have the Android programing environment on my new NFC enabled tablet, I downloaded and installed software. While I was waiting for the process to complete, I wished that the book had provided an NFC tag to help me set up a development environment. That would save me time.

What is an NFC tag? Readers of this blog might wonder. Here is a short introduction. An NFC tag may look like a sticker; it contains an antenna and a limited amount of memory. When an NFC device touches a tag, the tag takes a small amount of power from it and activates its electronics to transfer data to the NFC device. There are different types of tags and different tags have different memory capacities. Usually the information is stored in a specific data format (NDEF-NFC data exchange format) in the tag.

NFC tags cost about a dollar. As the price drops, we shall see significant usage increase since most of the smart phones are NFC enabled. NFC tags can be embedded almost anything including posters, wearable devices, clothing, etc. For example, as a prototype effort, Adidas added NFC tags to boost their running shoes sale. Shoppers could find details product information by tapping their NFC enabled phones to an NFC tag embedded in “lace jewel”. The jewel receives live social networking feeds from a combination of platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram so that it also can provide product reviews to the shoppers. It’s a powerful experience. I believe similar user experience will be integrated to our everyday life soon.

TechEd and WWDC reflection

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Last week the TechEd North America conference was held in New Orleans and new features for Windows 8.1 were presented. One of these new features is called tap-to-pair printing. When you put an NFC tag on an enterprise network printer, you can tap your Windows 8.1 device within 4 cm of the printer in order to establish connectivity so that you are able to print. There is no need to look for a correct printer on the network. Enterprise printing is made easy! This is a good demonstration of an NFC use case.

This week, iOS 7.0 was announced in Apple’s Developer conference. Nothing was mentioned about NFC. It makes me wonder about Apple’s NFC business strategy. When I attended the App World in London last October, vendors were already making iPhone 4 NFC sleeves in order to test mobile payments. Will the peripheral device becomes a trend for the iPhone, when Apple does not make an NFC enabled device? What are the risks and opportunities for the peripheral device makers that are investing in the NFC iPhone capability?

Yesterday Microsoft released a free app that will enable Office 365 for the iPhone. After the app is downloaded, you need to subscribe to Cloud based Office 365. That’s an up sell for iPhone users to adopt Office 365. It looks like the Microsoft business strategy is to generate revenue from the subscription model and extend the user base beyond the traditional Windows user. Tapping into the iPhone market seems to be a profitable path. Do you think NFC vendors should be committed to step into the similar path and offer iPhone NFC capability?

Apple’s NFC Patent

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A patent was issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office to Apple on June 4th, 2013.  The patent “System and method for simplified data transfer” was filed on June 8th, 2008.

Near Field Communication was in the summary of the patent as follows:
“A method of performing the simplified data transfer may include initiating communication using near field communication (NFC) between two devices. Next, data associated with open applications on one of the two devices may be saved and then transferred to the other. Transferring the data may take place using a peer-to-peer connection other than via NFC. “

In the current market, many newer mobile phones have NFC capability. Koichi Tagawa, NFC Forum chairman, presented The Worldview of NFC to the NFC Solutions Summit last month. He pointed out that the fast moving tablet segment is adopting NFC. ABI Research expects that 285 million NFC enabled devices will be shipped in 2013 [1].

Interestingly enough, since so many mobile devices that have NFC capability are in the market, Apple has not yet indicated their intention to adopt NFC into its lineup. The patent for NFC simplified data transfer gives Apple an incredible competitive advantage when they adopt the NFC technology and mobile apps are being developed.

[1] : http://www.abiresearch.com/press/nfc-will-come-out-of-the-trial-phase-in-2013-as-28

What Is NFC?

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Field Communication(NFC) technology, an RFID based short range (up to 4cm) wireless connectivity will impact our everyday life when adoption rate goes up.

This blog is created to facilitate the discussion and support the early adopters.

Please see my other NFC blog posts:

NFC Security Discussion in the NFC Solution Summit 2013

NFC Summit Solutions 2013

Driving NFC User Experience At The WIMA NFC USA Conference