Smash hit

Marketing companies are planning to use NFC to attract customers by embedding chips in posters that will offer passers-by more information – or the chance to be entered in to a competition.

In a trial by Orange in the Manchester City football stadium last summer, spectators were invited to wave their phone in front of a poster to receive additional information about the team.

Tourist operators and museums will be able to offer additional information to customers – especially in remote locations – without them needing to connect to a network.

As with any advance in communications technology there is a battle on to determine which standard will be adopted.

NFC, which is supported by the 110 members of the NFC Forum, including heavyweights such as Samsung and American Express, is effectively a kind of radio-based communication that is prompted by the phone’s proximity to a ‘tag’.

A rival group is advocating that a phone receives information by a camera taking a photo of a code printed on an object.

2D barcodes, as they are known, have become widespread in Japan, and according to the Mobile Codes Consortium – a group of companies including H-P and Publicis, the advertising group, are cheaper and simpler to use than NFC.

Thomas Curwen, interactive planning director at Publicis, said: “Some barcodes could contain weblinks, others could call up a telephone number and ask you if you’d like to ring it – and the only cost is ink.”

NFC supporters have criticised barcodes for being too slow because of the precision by which users have to position the camera – usually at a distance of about 10cm – and because they are subject to constraints such as lighting.

Security experts said that payments via NFC should be safe, but there is always the possibility that a communication could be intercepted – especially from several yards away, which means that phone owners should be extra-vigilant with their handsets if using them to store currency.

Stuart Criddle, a consultant with the firm NCC, explained: “Just because a device supports encryption doesn’t mean an application will implement it well, which was a problem for Bluetooth in the early days. That kind of network shouldn’t be anything someone without a high level of Government training will be able to break into, though.”

http://www.mobilecodes.org

http://www.nfc-forum.org

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