Smart-posters offer higher interaction versus their QR counterpart. With QR codes, the user has to launch an app, aim the camera to the QR code, scan or take a picture, and wait for the device to react. The light conditions, elements, age of the poster, etc. may interfere with the user interaction. With NFC, on the other hand, users simply tap on the poster to get the information (“Tap-to-Get”) stored on the tag (URLs, coupons, etc.). The information is transferred to the phone instantly, thereby improving the user experience (UX).

Smart-posters requires the smartphone to support NFC Discovery Mode which is currently limited to Android and Windows Phone mobile devices. Devices that support NFC Discovery Mode have the capabilities to read tags (and hence can read Smart-posters). Unfortunately, NFC-enabled iPhones don’t support Discovery Mode and can only emulate NFC tags. This is referred to as Card Emulation Mode. Without Discovery Mode support, the iPhone do not have the capability to interact with Smart-posters.

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While walking through mall or a retail store people are bombarded with information as advertisers fight for customers’ eyes.  Traditional posters provide visual promotion displaying phone numbers and/or web addresses, which the customer needs to remember or write down.  Because there is no analytics produced from the information displayed, and traceability is minimal, the response rates are very low.

On the other hand, the Enhanced Displays or Enriched Posters include methods to bridge the physical and digital world. Their goal is to provide a seamless user experience by converting the printed content into digital format, and from offline to mobile.

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What is Tokenization

A token is a randomly generated number that is used to hide a customer payment credentials stored in a credit card’s primary account number (PAN). Tokenization replaces the original payment credentials with a secure substitute. This unique identifier, called a Payment Token or Tokenized PAN, cannot be used if stolen as it is just a reference number, which only the bank can map to the customer’s payment credential.

Tokenization for credit cards have been around for a while, although it was recently popularized by the introduction of Apple Pay back in 2014.

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Apple Wallet is a preloaded app including iOS (starting from iOS 9, it was originally known as Passbook). Users can store credit cards, debit cards, boarding passes, store cards, tickets, retail coupons, general passes, etc. Wallet is supported by multiple coffee shops, airlines, party services, movie theaters, conferences, loyalty cards, etc.

The Wallet is divided on 2 sections:

• Apple Pay: Mobile payment service based on Contactless EMV specification.
  • Stores tokenized version of credit cards.
  • Users can pay in stores that accept contactless payments.
  • Synched up with iCloud to display last credit card transaction, etc.
• Passes:
  • Part of the initial Passbook ecosystem (launched on iOS 6)
  • Stores Virtual versions of boarding passes, store cards, etc.
  • Interact directly with iOS apps
  • Synched up with iCloud and can displayed dynamic data such as balance on the rewards card expiration date, flight status , etc.
  • Pass changes can be pushed via the Apple Push Notification Service

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Battery probe leads attached to Battery

Can a FloJack MSR (aka ACR35) be used for scanning NFC tag continuously? YES! We get asked this question a lot so we studied how the FloJack/ACR35 performs while continuously scanning. A situation that often happens when scanning a tag is that it triggers your app, instead of the other way around where your app prompts the user to scan one. With tag triggered apps the NFC reader must maintain the magnetic field (the “F” in Near Field Communications) and wait for a tag to be presented.

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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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Today’s a big day for us. We just broke 1000 members in our community. With over 190 questions and more than 480 replies, our Forums are buzzing with use cases and know-how for building NFC into your applications. Android is currently the best platform for it, but we’ll get the iOS folks sorted soon enough.

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