"NFC Touching the Future" competition results announced

As a first step, 20 finalists were selected (cf. Smart Insights #08-15). And the results were anounced during WIMA in Monaco earlier this week.

In the competition, developers in a Commercial Track vie for the honor of having their solutions named “The Best NFC Service of the Year 2008”, while a Research Track recognizes “The Most Innovative NFC Research Project of the Year 2008”

Commercial Track

• Winner: VingCard Elsafe (Norway):  Signature RFID by VingCard - Electronic Lock for Hotels. The product was introduced in June 2006. NFC-enabled cell phones are used to receive over-the-air keys to hotel rooms, and are then used with RFID electronic locks installed on hotel room doors. Hotel guests also receive a SMS with their hotel booking and room details.

• Second prize: Hansaprint (Finland):  Platform for Smart Product Creation. Hansaprint application is a web-driven application that helps consumers and business to easily create their own tags. Tags are custom-printed with customer's image, and data is downloaded in the associated tag, laminated with the print.

• Third prize: TeliaSonera (Sweden): Telia Kvittens. The Telia Kvittens is a web-based service that simplifies field work planning and follow up. It simplifies planning, administration and follow-up, for example, for cleaning companies, road carriers, delivery services, security companies, healthcare and nursing providers, and enterprises with many service-technicians on the road.

Research track

• Winner: Lancaster University (UK):  Touch & Interact, Applied to a Tourist Guide Prototype. The project aims at addressing the limited output capacity of mobile phones. Using Touch and Interact interaction technique, an NFC phone can touch a public display at any position to perform selections. During the interaction, both the phone display and the public display share the display space, allowing the separation of public and private information.

• Second prize: MBDS, University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis (France): Ticket Tap. Under this project, users subscribe to Ticket Tap services to receive mobile promotions. The Ticket Tap system uses a push strategy to deliver coupons and invitations, sales alerts, mobile shopping invitations, etc… The goal is to create a personalized mobile shopping service delivering targeted offers to customers based on their profiles.

• Third prize: University of Applied Sciences (Austria):  Theft Deterrent System for Skis. This is an anti-theft prototype for skis using NFC, RFID, Mifare technologies as interfaces between ski bindings, boots and configuration software. A tag is fitted in the skier's boots, and a NFC module in the ski binding, which will communicate with the legitimate owner in case of a ski theft attempt.