NFC stands for Near Field Communication and unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s very likely that you’ve used some form of it.  The technology has been around for over a decade and found it’s way into public transportation cards, access cards, and credit cards.  To create something useful with it you need readers and tags.  The readers send out energy that wake up the tags to respond.  It’s this dialog that tranfers data between the two.  Because NFC is designed to use magnetic energy, it’s very low power and only works when the reader and tag are less than 2in away.  This may sound like a bad thing, but not really.

NFC’s specifications make it’s chips much easier to make than traditional RFID chips.  That’s made it affordable to put them into cellphones, like the Google Galaxy Nexus.  Wait, so now I can ditch my public transportation card and use these phone instead?  Well not quite.  Even though the use of this tech has been around for a while, the NFC spec was only published in 2009.  So the proprietary systems of old just aren’t compatible with stuff that follows the spec.  That being said, chip makers -like NXP and TI– are pushing the limit and making devices that can do it all, NFC as well as proprietary stuff.

The day will come when all our devices can interact via NFC.  With the reader chips under $4 and tags under $0.50 that day isn’t too far away.  It will create an experience what most people call the Internet of Things.  What’s truly fascinating about that is the power of personalization that comes with it.  Think of all the things you have to configure today: your wifi router, your entertainment system, your car seat+mirrors, your in-store shopping experience.  How easy would life be if they all remembered you?

With Flomio that is now possible.  Try it out.