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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FloBLE Plus power probe

Customers have reported that FloBLE readers are losing connection while operating for long stretches. We thought this could be because batteries were draining out so we studied the overall power performance of the FloBLE Plus (ACR1255U-J1) in detail.  Ultimately, we wanted to know if a standard USB port (USB1.0 from PC) would enough to keep a FloBLE connected and scanning continuously. TL;DR: Yes! like the FloJack (ACR35), the FloBLE (ACR1255U-J1) is capable of continuously scanning NFC tags while powered by a standard USB port from a PC or wall adapter.

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Despite the growing popularity of mobile payment apps like Apple Pay and Android Pay, over the past couple years, retail stores have been slow to adopt them.

A little more than a third of consumers (36 percent) have used some form of mobile payment applications in the past year.

Source: Walker Sands Future of Retail Study 2016

Despite the lack of enthusiasm in embracing this technology, brick-and-mortar retail stores are trying to remove as much friction as possible from the payment process to eliminate consumer frustration and enhance the ‘buyer’s experience’.

To this end, retailers have adopted proprietary retail mobile apps that enable the customer to pay only in their stores (closed-loop payment).

Figure 1: Source: Walker Sands Future of Retail Study 2016

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Barcodes have been around for decades but strangely enough, the use of barcodes in mobile payments have only recently been picking up. Starbucks has been a pioneer in mobile payments using barcodes. Walmart and CVS have recently introduced a similar solution. Because of the embedded cameras, smartphones have been always capable of reading barcodes and that is one of the main reasons why barcodes are so ubiquitous.

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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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In 2012 the company Xius started to include NFC readers on  Smart-posters and began calling them Active-posters. The poster is embedded with an NFC reader (instead of a passive NFC tag) while the smartphone emulates an NFC tag.

Using Active-posters, smartphones need to emulate tags (Card Emulation Mode), just like Smart-posters. Until the iPhone 6, that behavior was unique to Android devices.

iPhone 6 added support for tag (card) emulation, but only for payment purposes (emulating a contactless credit card), since it was needed for their Apple Pay service. iOS 9 expanded the support of NFC beyond payment and launched the NFC-enabled passes.

Using NFC-enabled passes, iPhones can now interact with Active-poster. With the iPhone, the experience must be initiated from the Apple Wallet and then can be passed onto an app. With Android, the experience can start and continue directly from an app.

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