NFC city context sensitive and social networking experiments

Abstract

NFC (Near Field Communication) tries to harmonize today's diverse contact-less technologies, enabling current and future solutions like access control, ticketing, payment, loyalty programs, discount coupons, and information collection and exchange.The objectives of the NFC city project is to promote the development and use of services for information exchange, access, ticketing and payment through new applications of mobile and NFC technologies. IT will be achieved through the establishment of a complete NFC ecosystem including network infrastructure, trusted service manager (TSM) functionality, NFC services, and handsets. The idea is to reach a critical mass of users and to expose them for various services within a limited geographical area -a NFC city. The project will offer a toolbox for development of NFC services and stimulate service providers to test their applications and business models in realistic settings.University of Tromsø is responsible for the development and testing of a set of standalone services, pilots and showcases based on NFC read/write and NFC P2P functionalities. In this context these initial NFC experiments with context sensitive social networking applications have been performed [4]. The applications are implemented for the Android mobile platform communicating with servers running on traditional computers.All applications developed on the Android platform have been tested on a Samsung Nexus S. The Nexus S runs Android version 2.3.4, and is the first modern NFC-enabled smart phone.