Great demos, thought leaders, and vendors offering every ingredient to bake an awesome Internet of Things. That’s what I encountered at the 3rd Annual Auto-iD & Sensing Solutions Expo hosted by the MIT Media Labs. Flomio got the invite late last week (thanks for that, Stephen) so had to hustle a bit to get out to Boston in time.
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.
Lots of developers that are aware of NFC always wonder why I founded Flomio. Truth is that building a comprehensive solution using NFC and RFID is really tough. The space is extensive and you can easily get stuck with incompatibilities. This post will attempt to open up this topic.
“…it took an average of 47 seconds for them to take out their phone and find the application to read the QR code — not exactly a ‘quick response’ “
