NFC is back!?

I was just glad to see several reports praising the opportunities of NFC and documenting activities of several players that suddenly recognize NFC: the mobile network operators AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have started to test NFC according to Bloomberg, the online payments giant PayPal has partnered with Bling to implement payment, Facebook is experimenting with RFID according to AllFaceBook, Apple has hired an NFC expert and acquired several patents to implement NFC into the upcoming iphone 5 as TechCrunch reports, and new entrants as Google, Microsoft and others see NFC's advertising potential by linking a consumers' transaction history to their current location. Last but not least every "Nokia smartphone will have NFC, regardless of fact that the technology lacks a business model or any market demand", according to NFC World.

It would be great to deploy new consumer services current 1D-barcode applications are paving the road for and to revert on NFC which just provides a much better user experience than barcodes do [1]. Finally, we could move away from services where users deliberately have to scan items and arrive at services that push information to users once certain items enter the scanning range.

Back to the future of NFC - it has taken time, would be great to finally make it happen. Yet another step towards the internet of things for everybody...

[1] An Evaluation of Product Identification Techniques for Mobile Phones, F. von Reischach, F. Michahelles, D. Guinard, R. Adelmann, E. Fleisch, A. Schmidt, In Proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC13 Conference in Human-Computer Interaction (Interact'09), Sweden, August 2009, [PDF] [Talk]

Internet of Things and Citizens

I really get the feeling that moving from RFID, a technology for businesses, over an architecture for the internet of things, at least initally for businesses as well, to DYI consumer and citizen technology starts to touch the ground.
Rob van Kranenburg has released his report about the The 2nd Annual Conference Internet of Things Europe 2010. He outlines

integration of policy recommendations, applications and cloud to store

standards to go hand in hand with applications

more effective application of governance

multi stakeholder consultation process

migrate terms: seamless might shift towards usability: seamless experience, hard-coding might shift toward social values, in the sense of standard making will also mean not only technical but also interaction and value

as necessary step to achieve this vision. I do not agree with

What we need: an (EU) device:

as I do not believe that development and adoption of devices can be mandated. Obviously, I'd appreciate alternatives to all the Androids and iphones, but either it happens or it doesn't - but it can not be governed. Instead, I'm really intrigued by the opportunities of IoT is changing the relationship between the individuals allowing to scale democracy to finer-grain decision making. Which, obviously, requires education and debates about 'sensor wisdom’ very early on in schools.

Most importantly, it's already happening today:

express your opinion on everything, everywhere and in public
rewards shopper behavior, beginning when they walk through the door. Consumers rack up points for scanning products, testing products or even visiting a dressing room.
a mobile wallet—consumers can buy, send and redeem gift cards
users can find deals up to 20 miles away

INTERNET OF THINGS 2010 - Call for Workshop Papers/Call for Videos

INTERNET OF THINGS 2010 (IoT2010) is calling for workshop contributions and video submissions. See www.iot2010.org.

International Conference for Industry and Academia
Nov 29 - Dec 1, 2010, Tokyo Japan)
Organized by Auto-ID Laboratories at
Keio University, ETH Zurich & University of St. Gallen and MIT

Call for Video Submissions
IoT2010 invites submissions by Sept 10 of draft videos (2-5min long) that showcase the interlinking of physical world and cyberspace as a central theme to inspire other researchers and to educate the general public.

Videos will be shown as part of the main IoT 2010 program on November 30th and December 1st and to a general audience via youtube.

Please visit www.iot2010.org/video for further details on the submission.

Call for Workshop Papers
IoT2010 plays host to a range of interesting workshops (all on Nov 29) in the area of the Internet of Things. We want to draw your attention to the deadlines of the workshops that still invite and accept submissions.

Please see www.iot2010.org/workshop for details and follow the individual links to the workshop homepages for detailed topics, deadlines, and submission information.