For quite a while already now, I’m following a product / solution called ‘Tikitag’ recently renamed to ‘Touchatag’.
Using RFID technology ‘Touchatag’ provides consumers, businesses and third party application providers an unique service to link items of the ‘real world’ with online applications and information sources. It opens up new and richer experiences in a variety of areas: information retrieval, entertainment, registration, ticketing, e-payments, time or service registration for mobile workers, etc.
Let’s have a look at a simple example of a possible implementation. A museum can physically tag (with RFID stickers) all art pieces in its exhibition hall. All you need now as a visitor is an NFC enabled mobile phone (and quite some new 2009 mobile phone models will have this feature). Your phone reads the tags on the artifact and you will get all its related info (artist, date, style, possible interpretations, references to other works, …), all stored somewhere on a web server, on your mobile.
The product /solution comes with a complete developers API and hosting platform … so all the means are there for working out some interesting niche business.
Check out the ‘Touchatag’ website for more detailled info.
Tags: mobile applications, nfc, rfid