There are many ways to connecting to an IoT device, some are better than others. The challenge is simple, get the device onto your home/work WiFi. But how? Is your phone on the same wifi network? What’s the device named? Which one do you pair to? What if there are many devices? From RaspberryPis to Arduinos to custom designs, IoT developers need to get it right. Otherwise, they risk turning off customers before their product can be appreciated.

Apple and Google have solutions but they don’t play well together. You may have enjoyed provisioning Google Chromecast from an Android phone. Or setting up your AppleTV from your iPhone. It’s not as nice when you mix things up though. This is due to security upgrades to both Android and iOS that prevent apps from changing a user’s network settings. Despite being more secure, it kills the user experience.

NFC avoids the security issues by exchanging network settings directly. Rather than mess with complex WiFi modes and workflows, NFC is a sensible alternative that isn’t so difficult to implement. Flomio’s products and support assist product UX designers achieve the best result across hardware and software.

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Last week we announced our latest retail innovations alongside Amazon at their AWS re:Invent conference. An event filled with technology experts, it was a great place for us to introduce our SmartCart system. We got feedback from hundreds of developers including some involved with the AmazonGo store. Like AmazonGo, we aim to deliver the same –a streamlined purchase experience where shopper convenience is paramount– but with a different approach. We believe we can offer merchants a retrofit solution for their existing stores whereas AmazonGo is building their stores entirely from the ground up. What’s great is that we’re both built on the same AWS serverless infrastructure with flexible service options and endless scalability.

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Over the weekend, the team at Flomio had the opportunity to participate in the Money 20/20 Hackathon. 500 of the brightest minds in FinTech gathered in a ballroom at the Venetian in Las Vegas for a 24 hour all-night code fest. With over $125,000 in prizes on the line, the competition was fierce, so we were honored when our entry, BagBot, was selected across 120 teams as the winner.

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So the iPhone7 can now read NFC tags natively. W00T! But how well is it performing? We sought to figure that out objectively and benchmark it against Flomio readers and some Android devices. This should help enterprises and developers make best decisions on how to deploy robust solutions effectively.

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After almost 8 years since Google introduced NFC on Android smartphones, Apple has officially joined the party. iOS11 was announced yesterday at WWDC, Apple’s annual developer’s conference, as small footnote amongst a host of new features. Since you could have missed it if you weren’t paying attention, we figured we’d elaborate on what this means for developers and enterprises.

TL;DR: Only enabled on iPhone7/7+ devices.Supports ISO14443 and ISO15693 tags. Only reads NDEF data (no writing, no APDUs). App must run in the foreground (no background support). iOS11 general release out in September, 2017.

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Have you avoided going to a store lately because it’s just not worth the hassle? Unsure you’ll find what you need and if you do, unwilling to wait through checkout lines?
It’s no wonder shopping online is often the best option. At Flomio, we think we can change that. We’ve worked with the leaders in payments, loss prevention, and security industries to design the EASyPOS; a product so innovative, that it stands to fundamentally redefine the retail experience.  In fact, it makes shopping so easy, it feels like you’re shoplifting!

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I wrote this essay recently and it was picked up by WIRED. Wanted to share it with our community. Thanks for the support.

– Richard and the Flomies.

It’s been a month since Apple announced Apple Pay and today the service went live. There’s been a lot of uncertainty about what this means for Flomio, our products and the NFC ecosystem at large. Simply put: Apple’s announcement has been awesome for Flomio and is the shot of adrenaline that NFC needed. It has rejuvenated a technology often referred to as “NFC – Nobody Freakin’ Cares” and once again developers along with enterprises are excited about integrating it into their offerings. They’re asking hard questions like, “how can I deliver a personalized experience to a customer with an iPhone6?”, “can I engage them using something other than expensive POS terminals?”, and “will I be able to trigger NFC actions like on Android devices?”. Flomio has answered these questions for industry leaders like Carnival and Texas Instruments and we can answer them for you.

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Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work on our WordPress site, https://flomio.com, having just published our first WooCommerce plugin for sale, an EasyPost Shipping Method, but more on that later. Flomio has iterated through a bunch of site frameworks over the years, starting with Django/Python and ultimately settling on Wordpress/PHP. Each has pros/cons but what drew us to WordPress was it’s popularity among creatives. The need to keep the site fresh meant our designers had to publish content without having to depend on programmers. WordPress’s intuitive admin interface makes this possible and the many plugins available online lets non-coders add functionality without much support. From responsive themes to social sharing widgets to ecommerce to forums, all these features have helped us engage our community while still building out our products.

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I just got back from the NFC Solutions Summit. It could have easily been called the BLE Solutions Summit though. Payment and non-payment enterprise leaders are scrambling to keep up with the rapidly changing consumer mobile landscape. I spoke to several CIOs and SVPs at companies like Advanced Card Systems, HID, Tyfone, ABnote, and Xerox and their interest in BLE was astounding. It’s understandable since most of the applications being talked about aim to improve context relevance more than transactions.

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