The Apple developer's conference kicks off this morning in San Francisco & the word on the street is that Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, will be announcing that the new iPhone will have 3G support. If you are like me & rushed out to get the first release of the iPhone you are by now so frustrated with the speed of AT&T's Edge network that you rarely use your iPhone's Internet connection unless you are connected to a Wi-Fi network.
Of course the news of a 3G enabled iPhone will make me happy, what I'm most looking forward to finding out is whether or not the new iPhone will be enabled for Near Field Communications (NFC). Like so many others in the space of mobile transactions we all want to see more mobile phones hit the market with NFC capabilities. We all know how other companies follow suit when Apple does something so let's hope Jobs & his team engineered this iPhone release with NFC support. Combine the iPhone's SDK with NFC & we can make magic happen!
Showing posts with label near field communications. Show all posts
Showing posts with label near field communications. Show all posts
Monday, June 9, 2008
Friday, June 6, 2008
Standards with Standards & more Standards
My head is still spinning after a discussion today with the folks at BrightCard. I was looking for more information about a NFC SD Card from Wireless Dynamics & BrightCard had a great deal of knowledge to share. Like so many other technologies, there are standards with standards & more standards. Since Near Field Communications (NFC) is such a new technology & the market is basically open to so many possibilities it’s imperative that we all start talking the same language & adhering to the standards that are in place today.
A quick tutorial on some standards & language used in this market space:
To start with, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) & Near Field Communications (NFC) are not the same thing. In the market, RFID has come to refer to inventory tracking where NFC is more specific to person transactions. A key difference between RFID & NFC protocols are the way in which the master/slave relationship is handled. In RFID there is a master & a slave & the master & slave roles can now be reversed. Whereas with NFC, the role of master & slave can be reversed, you can even have a peer to peer relationship when using NFC.
Take this NFC use-case for example to better understand this role reversal. A woman walking through a subway terminal sees a movie poster with a NFC tag affixed to it. The women pulls out her NFC enabled mobile phone & reads in the information about the movie via the NFC tag affixed to the movie poster. In this scenario the movie poster is performing the master role & the mobile phone is performing the slave role. The woman then proceeds to purchase a ticket for this movie using Over The Air (OTA) technology – following the OTA purchase a ticket stub is downloaded to the woman’s mobile phone. The woman then arrives at the movie theatre & taps her mobile phone at the NFC reader installed at the checkout counter. The mobile phone pushes the movie ticket to the NFC reader fulfilling the mobile payment. The mobile phone just filled the master role & the NFC reader at the checkout performed the slave role.
You got have a standard without ISO, right? ISO14443 & 15693 are the international standards for contactless smart cards operating at a radio frequency of 13.56 MHz. ISO14443 has a range of 10cm (4 inches) & is viewed as the more secure of the two standards. ISO14443 is what the Near Field Communications protocol adheres too. ISO 15693 has a much wider range of transmission, 1 – 1.5 meters, & is more likely to be used for tracking of inventory in a warehouse (asset tracking).
It doesn’t end there. There are two main communication protocols supported under the ISO 14443 standard series – Type A & Type B. The main differences between Type A & Type B concern modulation methods, coding schemes, & protocol initialization procedures. Type A is the most common of these two types. An attempt to include legacy systems as appendixes – Type C (Sony/Japan), Type D (OTI/Israel), type E (Cubic/USA), & Type F (Legic/Switzerland) & Type G (China) – but these legacy types were not accepted as ISO-standard.
As you can see, there are a number of new standards being developed & the language we use when discussing this market is going to be complicated & messy at first. Because there is so much potential for this market & integrations are already complex enough I believe it is our responsibility as industry leaders to help define these standards & start talking the same talk.
A quick tutorial on some standards & language used in this market space:
To start with, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) & Near Field Communications (NFC) are not the same thing. In the market, RFID has come to refer to inventory tracking where NFC is more specific to person transactions. A key difference between RFID & NFC protocols are the way in which the master/slave relationship is handled. In RFID there is a master & a slave & the master & slave roles can now be reversed. Whereas with NFC, the role of master & slave can be reversed, you can even have a peer to peer relationship when using NFC.
Take this NFC use-case for example to better understand this role reversal. A woman walking through a subway terminal sees a movie poster with a NFC tag affixed to it. The women pulls out her NFC enabled mobile phone & reads in the information about the movie via the NFC tag affixed to the movie poster. In this scenario the movie poster is performing the master role & the mobile phone is performing the slave role. The woman then proceeds to purchase a ticket for this movie using Over The Air (OTA) technology – following the OTA purchase a ticket stub is downloaded to the woman’s mobile phone. The woman then arrives at the movie theatre & taps her mobile phone at the NFC reader installed at the checkout counter. The mobile phone pushes the movie ticket to the NFC reader fulfilling the mobile payment. The mobile phone just filled the master role & the NFC reader at the checkout performed the slave role.
You got have a standard without ISO, right? ISO14443 & 15693 are the international standards for contactless smart cards operating at a radio frequency of 13.56 MHz. ISO14443 has a range of 10cm (4 inches) & is viewed as the more secure of the two standards. ISO14443 is what the Near Field Communications protocol adheres too. ISO 15693 has a much wider range of transmission, 1 – 1.5 meters, & is more likely to be used for tracking of inventory in a warehouse (asset tracking).
It doesn’t end there. There are two main communication protocols supported under the ISO 14443 standard series – Type A & Type B. The main differences between Type A & Type B concern modulation methods, coding schemes, & protocol initialization procedures. Type A is the most common of these two types. An attempt to include legacy systems as appendixes – Type C (Sony/Japan), Type D (OTI/Israel), type E (Cubic/USA), & Type F (Legic/Switzerland) & Type G (China) – but these legacy types were not accepted as ISO-standard.
As you can see, there are a number of new standards being developed & the language we use when discussing this market is going to be complicated & messy at first. Because there is so much potential for this market & integrations are already complex enough I believe it is our responsibility as industry leaders to help define these standards & start talking the same talk.
Open Market for NFC Innovations
I had a conversation yesterday with a gentleman who is with M:Metrics. M:Metrics provides statistics & data based on mobile media. Like many other companies, we at NetworkIP are looking to obtain some real-world data on the number of mobile phones available & that have been purchased with Near Field Communications (NFC) support. Come to find out that M:Metrics isn’t even tracking this data right now. The response from M:Metrics was that they are aware of NFC, but not directly measuring it currently because the market place is essentially zero. The market for these things is huge; as an example, take the search for data that many of us in the space are involved in.
Unfortunately what M:Metrics is saying is true. You’ll be hard pressed to find a NFC enabled mobile phone here in the U.S. I was happy to see Nokia release their 6131 model phone with NFC support in early 2007 & too my knowledge the 6131 remains the only mobile phone available with NFC here in the U.S.
We do know that Samsung played part in the NFC BART pilot conducted in San Francisco, CA earlier this year. Unfortunately I’m not aware of the model of phone used for this pilot. Maybe it was Samsung’s X700 which has been rumored to have NFC capabilities or possibly they used a SD chip with NFC capabilities such as the SDiD 1010 NFC SD card from Wireless Dynamics.
As more pilots like the BART pilot are conducted, both businesses & consumers are sure to see the value in NFC & we’ll see the number of mobile phones with NFC capabilities on the rise. Industry leaders suspect NFC will be widely adopted nearer end of 2009. The good news is that it’s not a question of “if”, but “when” it will happen.
Unfortunately what M:Metrics is saying is true. You’ll be hard pressed to find a NFC enabled mobile phone here in the U.S. I was happy to see Nokia release their 6131 model phone with NFC support in early 2007 & too my knowledge the 6131 remains the only mobile phone available with NFC here in the U.S.
We do know that Samsung played part in the NFC BART pilot conducted in San Francisco, CA earlier this year. Unfortunately I’m not aware of the model of phone used for this pilot. Maybe it was Samsung’s X700 which has been rumored to have NFC capabilities or possibly they used a SD chip with NFC capabilities such as the SDiD 1010 NFC SD card from Wireless Dynamics.
As more pilots like the BART pilot are conducted, both businesses & consumers are sure to see the value in NFC & we’ll see the number of mobile phones with NFC capabilities on the rise. Industry leaders suspect NFC will be widely adopted nearer end of 2009. The good news is that it’s not a question of “if”, but “when” it will happen.
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