How is it being skipped? As an example, parking meters in San Francisco are almost all NFC-equipped. Google's flagship phones have all been NFC-enabled. The future looks bright for NFC...
I don't see mobile wallets going too far until Apple gets on board. And that's a big if at this point, seeing as there won't be any NFC on Apple devices for at least another year.
I think a barrier at least equally as large in some places will be that it's only really on flagships - if it needs to be used by the masses getting it into every Android smartphone instead of a select few would be a huge step forward. In many places that would probably be more significant than Apple implementing it (although not North America, which is at a guess disproportionately significant for development effort etc)
I have a Nexus 4 and live in SF. The NFC feature on the meters almost never works. Probably 10% of the time. I have to enter the meter ID most of the time.
The biggest problem with NFC, etc... it's still significantly faster to swipe a credit card! Getting my phone out, unlocking it with a code, making sure the screen stays on while I stand in line (for e.g. Starbucks). This future is for the birds.
I've had similar experience. I have a Galaxy Nexus and had a terrible time getting the NFC stuff to work. My friends and I stood around looking like idiots for a good 10-15 minutes trying to get basic stuff like sending contacts or files to each other. Getting a good connection was nearly impossible. Maybe it's gotten better, but boy was it terrible when I tried it.
Just take a picture of a QR code and be done with it. Works great.
What kind of hardware is more prevalent, graphical displays and cameras, or NFC hardware?
Anything you can do with NFC you can do easier (easier, not easily...) with QR codes.
NFC hardware is slightly more vandalism resistant than displays and cams. But bulletproof displays and cams are pretty tough, and if you're going to have to put up a cam to protect the NFC hardware, may as well go all QR code.
If you want NFC, the easiest way to get it is to look in your wallet for a Master Card. Call the phone number on the Master Card, ask for a PayPass. I stick the paypass to the inside of my wallet. It works 100% of the time, with no unlocking or launching an app. I don't open my wallet, just put it close to the machine, and it works without issue.
The problem of PayPass, though, is that some stores just don't bother maintaining their PayPass reader so it works.
Half a time, it either doesn't work, or I've seen cases a store person not knowing how to interpret the fact that payment was accepted or not.
Rather than going through this, it's just easier to just take out the card and use that instead. Another thing about those NFC methods, considering they are relatively new technology, is that they are not seeing something tangible and it apparently makes a store person bit nervous when it doesn't work. I often observed signs of hostility, perhaps, they feel like I'm trying to do something nasty, because they just don't know what that's all about.
Interesting. I have an iPhone so I'm never able to use the NFC feature. However, I find that opening the app and typing in the meter number is quite fast, since I can walk away while doing it. Also, the ability to extend my parking remotely is pretty awesome.
This is the main reason why my company[0] went against the NFC route to allow mobile payments for vending machines. We were at the TC disrupt last week and everyone was downplaying NFC for anything useful. Its nice for small things like tasker, but for anything that needs to be done quick it does fair too well IMO.
Let's be realistic, all the signs of this point to "acquihire". The statement on their page doesn't give a real convincing feeling that Google bought them in order to make this concept a ubiquitous part of Android or anything like that.
Bump is/was "neat". I downloaded the app the instant I heard about it, 4 years ago? In all that time I never "bumped" with another person. I exchange about 700 business cards per year. For the first 18 months, and then a couple of random times later, I'd ask people "do you have Bump?", met with nothing but odd stares. NOBODY every asked me or suggested we us an app to exchange contact info.
I love the idea, but it just doesn't seem to have taken off. Not to mention that (IMO) this was a little more of a "feature" than a "product".
Don't get me wrong, they built something cool, gots lots of users and presumably lots of active users, and managed to get acquired by Google. I have tons of respect for the team, but I don't think you can draw any conclusions from this acquisition as it relates to NFC or anything else.
Even though I hadn't thought about this company for a long time, just yesterday evening I was wondering "whatever happened to Bump?" and checked their site.
Since the start they've had interesting technology (though of the kind that looks easier to implement than it really is) but, in my opinion at least, never found a killer app for it. I remember when they had that webpage where you would hit the space bar with your phone and that would be enough to create the connection. That was really cool, but it felt like a "cool trick" rather than something I ended up using.
edit: I didn't want to come off as negative and I'm sorry if it reads this way. Their solutions are very innovative and inventive, and really feel magical. I just wish it had caught on more… Hopefully Google is planning on using the technology in many places. It would make sense of course for it to be part of the core of Android, but the syncing between mobile and desktop could be very useful as well.
So, this leaves everyone who was building something on top of Bump in a very odd position. Do we continue building on Bump, or do we work to implement something else on our own.
Please note, I'm not saying they are wrong for being acquired by Google. Just saying that as of right now, building on the Bump platform just got a lot more unsure.
That could have been said for Dropbox too. There's pros and cons to each approach. If Bump was built into a single OS, it'd limit its interoperability.
1) It's a technology, not a feature. Many companies, mostly Android handset makers but also Blackberry and Nokia, have included it in their devices as "yet another selling point". It was included not as a way to make a better device or experience for customers, but as a gimmick for upselling handsets.
2) It's insecure. Holy hell, Batman. Just spend a couple minutes reading through the security section of the NFC Wikipedia entry. It's insanely easy to read transactions remotely, modify data, and jam signals. Even more, there is no hint of security built into the technology. None. No RF signal modification detection, no encryption.
3) Unreliable. While it sounds like a good idea on paper, for the most part it just doesn't work very well in practice. There's too many subpar implementations in too many devices. Just because you have a good one in your handset doesn't help when most of the limited ones available in public are cheap.
There's a damn good reason Apple hasn't included NFC. It's broken. They definitely put out crappy products from time to time (don't forget Ping, iPod socks, Maps, Siri, MobileMe, and about 300 variations of the Mac before Jobs came back). But NFC hasn't proven to be something useful or valuable. They won't include it. Perhaps something like it in the future, but never NFC in its current form.
Tech product messaging 101: Every technology you don't support is dead and useless, unless you're FUDding about how much better your vaporware version is than everyone else's actually existing product.
Interestingly when Johny Ive was saying "It's not just rampant technology for technology's sake. Every single component, every process has been considered and measured to make sure that its truly useful and it actually enhances the user experience" in the new 5s introduction videos, it reminded me of NFC specifically. For many reasons that you listed this otherwise cool technology is not yet ready.
Yeah NFC and a few other things came to mind when he talked about it. It's an interesting technology but it's just not big enough to make it worth the development time on including it into their devices, but from what I've heard from someone who worked for a large UK phone company Apple did actually accidentally release SKU details that listed NFC, only for it to be missing in action at release. I'm sure they've explored it before declaring it dead in the water.
I would just like to point out that NFC is doing well in China, and in Hong Kong it's used brilliantly (public transportation, payments).
I think the reason it hasn't caught on here is because municipalities, malls, theme parks, etc., haven't embraced the technology, so there's no need for it to be in our phones.
I can't understand how any of original commenters points are poignant when its a proven technology deployed in large scale in many asian countries. If security and unreliability was an issue, why is it still widespread and adopted in all these countries, and these examples have proven its much more than a feature.
Metric system, Tankless water heaters, Anime, Rice cooker appliances, cheap competitive cell phone service, cheap competitive broadband. Its not exactly the first thing to work great in Asia and not sell in the USA.
I have been looking around for accounts of NFC being as successful as you and other people claim. I'm not refuting your argument, just asking for clarification.
The top search results for "nfc asia" and "nfc hong kong" mainly return press releases and news articles about how NFC is being rolled out. In fact, most of the ones I found are as recent as July and August.
There was one older story from April 2011 talking about "hundreds of field trials" but no follow-on detail.
I'm not doubting that certain markets in major Asian cities have seen NFC rollouts. But I question a) the scale and b) the public reception. Indeed, since smart phones are still catching on in major markets in many Asian markets I am doubtful of how wide-spread NFC adoption actually can be.
I'd love to see some specific stories that refute my point of view.
Octopus cards are incredibly cool in HKG (RFID, of which NFC is a subset). Store some cash and you can use the MTR or buy things from 7-11 super easily. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_card Once you try it, you wish North America woke up...
As erohead mentioned, the Octopus card is extremely successful, though it's limited to Hong Kong only.
Train stations in mainland China use something similar, though I'm basing this only my experience with one city, but a big one at that (Guangzhou).
Part of the reason why you aren't finding more accounts of successful NFC rollouts in Asia might be because you aren't searching in the local languages.
Every single person I know here in Tokyo -- except the iPhone users -- has a cellphone which can can be used to go through ticket gates to board trains, purchase items at convenience stores, and dispense things from vending machines.
Purely anecdotal, granted, but you asked for stories.
(Personally, I use an iPhone with a Pasmo NFC card duct-taped to the back of it.)
> I'm not doubting that certain markets in major Asian cities have seen NFC rollouts. But I question a) the scale and b) the public reception. Indeed, since smart phones are still catching on in major markets in many Asian markets I am doubtful of how wide-spread NFC adoption actually can be.
The strength of phone NFC seems to be that it's basically a "smart card on your phone," and smart cards as a payment method are extremely common in places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc., largely driven by their ubiquity in the form of mass-transit cards (Suica, Pasmo, Octopus, etc).
Far more people have smart cards than have smartphones in these places, and so offering smart-card-compatible NFC functionality on phones seems a no-brainer.
The result of this is that NFC-on-your-phone has worked for ages in Japan, on all types of phone ("smart" and otherwise, except the iphone), and as it uses a widespread existing infrastructure, there's no real issue with availability.
In other words, NFC is not something that's dependent on smartphone popularity for success; rather smartphones with NFC are simply trying to take advantage of an existing successful system to become more popular.
As for the question "do people use it?" I can't refer you to any "stories" but I can say that I personally see lots of people paying for stuff with their phone.... [The main issue with smartphones seems to be that the iphone doesn't support NFC, and lots of people have iphones...]
As someone who spent a lot of time in Japan I can also report that cellphones as payment has been in large use for years now for public transportation, vending machines, etc.
NFC supports encryption, which solves the eavesdropping and unauthorized modification problems. It's done at the card level as an optional feature, since not all applications need encryption.
And as for it being unreliable: [citation needed]. I've never had problems sending data to another NFC-enabled device. The only time I've ever had it not work was back when phones with non-NXP chipsets first started to appear on the market, and some folks were still selling standalone tags that used NXP's older proprietary format (MIFARE Classic) rather than the standardized format (NFC Forum). That's rarely a problem these days.
I don't think geuis is saying the actual communication is unreliable, but the actions are. I.e. the NFC part works, but the whole touch to share (say a video or whatever) part has more troubles. Which is a problem even though it is just a failing of handling things hugher up the stack it makes it look like NFC is problematic.
The lower level stuff and NDEF format is well standardized. The higher level operations are not nearly as well standardised right now, even more so when you're dealing with large files, which will require a handoff to Bluetooth or WiFi Direct.
In NFC's defense, it's only recently (4.2, Jelly Bean) that Android even supported transferring large files via Bluetooth handoff, so hopefully that stuff will improve with time.
> And as for it being unreliable: [citation needed]. I've never had problems sending data to another NFC-enabled device
I've personally never had it work. I tried twice with different two phones (Motorola and Samsung) and while it did recognize it was supposed to do something NFC-esque, the data never transferred. At that point I gave up and just swapped SD-cards and manually copied the data over.
Just my experience but I'm not interested in trying again when there are other methods that I know will transfer data guaranteed to work.
Pretty much any time you have an open port accepting of wireless data, it should be encrypted, especially when that port is on a device with a cpu. In other words, there are no wireless data transmission applications that don't need encryption other than broadcasting.
I can think of one big case: Many NFC tags are used as QR codes. Encrypting this doesn't really get you anything, since it's public information that's being broadcast freely to anyone anyway.
On the flip side, adding the extra hardware to a tag to support encryption has a non-trivial cost. (NFC tags are limited by both storage space and power.) If you're doing mass production of tags, that cost adds up very quickly.
I'd reason that QR codes are a form of broadcasting. encryption can be done on modern chips with specialized hardware at negligible latency costs. chips that have ops for encryption have been around for over a decade now.
I think NFC is missing its mark - to me, the obvious use for NFC isn't device-to-device connections and sending files and all that, but for peripherals. One-step bluetooth pairing with an NFC tag would be lovely, right? Just bump-and-pair.
For gaming - imagine a game console with mix-and-match one-handed controllers. Trackballs, joysticks, pointers, keyboards, mice, etc. Bump them together to tell the console "I'm using the whamblefloog with the xorchball" so it can tie each disparate controller to the concept of a two-handed player.
Bluetooth pairing via NFC is starting to appear in a few devices. Off the top of my head, Monoprice has a bluetooth audio receiver that has this feature, as does a Parrott's bluetooth headphones.
That's not exactly true. In Canada government-backed Interac Flash [1] made many merchants accept NFC-enabled cards (debit and credit). I personally use it quite often (e.g. when buying groceries at Metro stores) and not only is it convenient for customers, but also I'm sure it has strong business case and good ROI for the merchants since it allows serving customers faster with shorter lines and fewer cachiers.
I can't exactly speak for the entire Europe, but in Poland almost everybody has a Visa PayPass card, and you can pay with them pretty much everywhere now. It is also not uncommon to see someone pay with his NFC-enabled phone.
In the eternal wheel of IT nothing is ever new. NFC is just IRDA without line of site problems. As if that was the main user problem with IRDA LOL thats probably the only thing that wasn't broken with IRDA. Everything is playing out exactly the same way, as it always does.
I would be willing to bet, in the eternal rotation of the IT wheel, that the next revolution will be something very much like IRDA in your google glass glasses.
Of course it'll be hampered by incompatibility, relatively low uptake, unreliable software, insecurity, probably only supported by certain platforms, and probably an awful and difficult to use UI, so it'll die out. To be replaced by more or less identical short range RF "solution" (and guess how that will turn out?)
There's no reason short range IR or RF can't work at the hardware level. No reason a unified, generic, stable standard can't exist. Other than the whole, lack of need thing.
Look how well bluetooth and wifi work using basically the same technology... because they solved actual problems.
Agreed about #3 especially. My wife and I both recently got NFC-capable phones and we can allegedly send photos and contacts back and forth, but there seem to be severe problems at both the basic communication level (it is extremely difficult to get the two devices to even make the NFC handshake because the NFC antennas need to be aligned so ridiculously precisely), and at the application level (once you actually manage to get them to beep and communicate, Windows Phone and Android apparently don't agree on content types or something, because you just get errors saying the content type isn't supported).
For a technology that's supposed to make sharing data so quick and easy, it seems like a really bad sign that I have not been able to make it work even once, despite sitting there fiddling with it for probably 20 minutes. It's like someone looked at the extremely painful and ill-defined bluetooth pairing user experience and said, "yeah, that's a good starting point, but let's make it a little more frustrating."
I think your statements are misleading, and make the technology look worse than it seems.
Apple and the US market aren't the entire universe. NFC is already used in other countries for secure communication (payments, ID, etc), but that's not even one of the most interesting aspects of it.
I will stick to Bump, since that's the subject of the topic: when I checked a couple of years ago, their way of connecting two devices was primitive and rather insecure, it was essentially a heuristic that used several parameters to guess which two users "bumped".
NFC would have solved the problem perfectly, with no network communication needed and 100% user-to-user match rate.
Yeah I am confused too after seeing all the discussion on NFC. I thought Bump uses the accelerometer (and thus works on the iphone too). SO where did NFC come in all of this?
Just curious - why are iPod Socks in 'crappy products' group? I thought they looked awesome and were actually useful - yeah, they were kinda overpriced, but hey, Apple.
Are iPod Socks really considered a failed product?
Because they were silly. Sure, a modest amount sold but they were generally regarded as a laughable product. This was largely because they were debuted by Jobs, who we expected to only personally show off serious items.
Would have loved to see Bump pivot to an in-person transaction verification and facilitation app. Imagine having Bump as the intermediary of in-person transactions for large purchases coordinated over Craiglist sales.
I think you're confusing an "is" statement for an "ought" statement. Google probably will be shutting Bump down. Is that a bad thing? The GP comment didn't say anything about that one way or another; just that it's probably going to happen, whether its defensible or not.
Google acquires Bump. It's not the "bumping" that's valuable. It's figuring out two people are in proximity to each other that allows them to bump - that's Gold.
Is that a very difficult problem? I thought they just grab the location from the phone, send it to their service, and their service looks for other bumps in the physical and temporal vicinity. It's a rather clever solution, but not exactly a technology that seems worth acquiring, unless there are some patents or tricky performance optimizations I'm missing.
Can anyone speculate? The only thing I'm coming up with is that it might require a geo index for quickly calculating the distances between a huge number of location pairs.
It is in same realm as synching datas I think. GPS is unreliable for close distances, phone clocks, user connections, the reading of the accelerometer...every little part adds fuzziness, and you have to trim down your data to get something relevant, limit the rate of false positive while allowing some leeway.
A few years ago a bunch of users in an BBS were playing with the app by bumping alone and see who the algorithm would pick as a match in their town. I guess it got better, but at that time you had something like a one in five chance to get a match in downtown areas.
Not really as far as I was aware as it work(ed) on devices without a GPS fix or hardware. Used accelerometer signals, radio signal strength, as many signals as they could get as I recall. I remember hearing they were even emitting an inaudible tone so that devices in vicinity could pick it up.
This is such a classic HN comment, sorry. You start off with a totally fair premise, asking genuinely if this is a difficult problem.
But then, you go on to speculate not just that it's probably not technically difficult, just "clever", and then go even further to speculate that it's probably "not exactly a technology that seems worth acquiring." Are you asking questions in good faith or are you making claims? What you wrote here seems less a genuine question and more a post to downplay bump's work and their acquisition as worthy.
The edge cases are enormous - smartphones aren't always running on the same time, and their internet connection delays might be different (one on WiFi, the other on Edge) so syncing time would be difficult. One might give a location based on GPS, the other just the nearest telephone pole. Or maybe none at all, or the wrong one (it happens), or different poles. If you get only 1 bump every 10 seconds it would be easy, but Bump's market probably like to hang out at social events, making it harder to figure out time-wise which bumps are which.
I can go on, but if you can't imagine it being difficult, then your imagination needs work!
I think the hard part of their patented algorithm would be to use data from the accelerometer - basically the only thing that can be 'trusted' - to match bumps up through the unique bumping signature/characteristics. Actually - since it's patented it should be public record, so we could go look it up.
From what i understand it uses the accelerometer to create a "bump signature" and matches the two devices according to that. The geo-location thing only helps filter that search and i think they introduced that part later on when they got a huge number of users across the globe.
Now what is note-worthy here is that the signatures wouldn't be "identical". They may not even be opposite as i think the idea is to bump your HANDS while holding them, so the hands may distort the vibrations. So the fact that they actually managed it to WORK is astounding.
Last year in December, I spent a week wrote an API that processes up to 5 mobile inputs and cross references them to see if they are the same. The idea was to use multiple input factors to determine if two devices were close to each other (Color R.I.P - has some pending pattents surround this). They most challenging parts were matching audio and photo. I had the demo up and running on my iPhone in a week though.
For awhile, I've thought that the problem with Bump is that it requires that the other person shares the same app (although recently I discovered that you can ask the other person to browse to http://bu.mp). So I have been working on the side on an HTML5 mobile solution that allows sharing contact information and messages with people nearby by just asking them to go to a URL.
The site needs a big UI and workflow revamp (already worked out on paper) and won't scale right now (it just uses a single instance of Meteor and a MongoDB database and doesn't handle Internet-scale abuse.)
I was trying it on my iMac and phone, opened the website on both devices, then it somewhat disappointed me (should have looked better) by asking to sign in with Facebook. A login-less demo would sell itself better.
Yeah, the UI is ugly and overly complicated right now. It is really more of a technical demo and a project for me to experiment with Meteor on at this point (it has zero active users.)
I am presently requiring a login to post to (in theory) prevent flooding it with spam. The person who is receiving the message does not need to log in. I have thought about removing the Facebook login requirement either for now (when there aren't many users) or permanently (need to have a way to prevent spam.)
I always thought bump would be a compelling technology if it was baked into an OS liked Android. The main issue was getting past the hurdle of convincing others to download it - no one wanted to download an app just to exchange contact info in a moment of need.
If was already on your phone I could see users adopting it for things like contacts & photo exchange.
Can we all stop congratulating eachother for Aquihires? Clearly it wasn't the goal to build a company for 4 years only to see it for parts. Oh, because Google bought it then its pats-on-the-back all around.
I wish we could have more detail on these kind of transactions.
Someone glancing at the headline would assume this was a successful exist for a YCombinator backed company.
However, perhaps any remaining cash was returned to the original investors, less costs of liquidation, and any assets were "sold" to Google for $1 with some of the development team moving to Google as temporary contractors or probationary hires, rather than immediate permanent hires.
I think this obfuscation comes from a fear of failure, which is ironic given that it's the ready acceptance of failure and the can-do attitude which is supposed to set American entrepreneurs apart from Europeans and others.
It seems that investors are now scared of failing, losing money and the impact on reputation, so they want to preserve their mythical image as Titans of Silicon Valley (much like investment bankers believed they were Masters of the Universe) for as long as possible. Thus they come up with dubious acquisitions, acquihires and mask strategic failure as pivoting.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadThe biggest problem with NFC, etc... it's still significantly faster to swipe a credit card! Getting my phone out, unlocking it with a code, making sure the screen stays on while I stand in line (for e.g. Starbucks). This future is for the birds.
What kind of hardware is more prevalent, graphical displays and cameras, or NFC hardware?
Anything you can do with NFC you can do easier (easier, not easily...) with QR codes.
NFC hardware is slightly more vandalism resistant than displays and cams. But bulletproof displays and cams are pretty tough, and if you're going to have to put up a cam to protect the NFC hardware, may as well go all QR code.
Half a time, it either doesn't work, or I've seen cases a store person not knowing how to interpret the fact that payment was accepted or not.
Rather than going through this, it's just easier to just take out the card and use that instead. Another thing about those NFC methods, considering they are relatively new technology, is that they are not seeing something tangible and it apparently makes a store person bit nervous when it doesn't work. I often observed signs of hostility, perhaps, they feel like I'm trying to do something nasty, because they just don't know what that's all about.
[0] http://likeus.co
Bump is/was "neat". I downloaded the app the instant I heard about it, 4 years ago? In all that time I never "bumped" with another person. I exchange about 700 business cards per year. For the first 18 months, and then a couple of random times later, I'd ask people "do you have Bump?", met with nothing but odd stares. NOBODY every asked me or suggested we us an app to exchange contact info.
I love the idea, but it just doesn't seem to have taken off. Not to mention that (IMO) this was a little more of a "feature" than a "product".
Don't get me wrong, they built something cool, gots lots of users and presumably lots of active users, and managed to get acquired by Google. I have tons of respect for the team, but I don't think you can draw any conclusions from this acquisition as it relates to NFC or anything else.
I don't know the Bump team, but I respect the effort and the outcome.
Since the start they've had interesting technology (though of the kind that looks easier to implement than it really is) but, in my opinion at least, never found a killer app for it. I remember when they had that webpage where you would hit the space bar with your phone and that would be enough to create the connection. That was really cool, but it felt like a "cool trick" rather than something I ended up using.
edit: I didn't want to come off as negative and I'm sorry if it reads this way. Their solutions are very innovative and inventive, and really feel magical. I just wish it had caught on more… Hopefully Google is planning on using the technology in many places. It would make sense of course for it to be part of the core of Android, but the syncing between mobile and desktop could be very useful as well.
Please note, I'm not saying they are wrong for being acquired by Google. Just saying that as of right now, building on the Bump platform just got a lot more unsure.
1) It's a technology, not a feature. Many companies, mostly Android handset makers but also Blackberry and Nokia, have included it in their devices as "yet another selling point". It was included not as a way to make a better device or experience for customers, but as a gimmick for upselling handsets.
2) It's insecure. Holy hell, Batman. Just spend a couple minutes reading through the security section of the NFC Wikipedia entry. It's insanely easy to read transactions remotely, modify data, and jam signals. Even more, there is no hint of security built into the technology. None. No RF signal modification detection, no encryption.
3) Unreliable. While it sounds like a good idea on paper, for the most part it just doesn't work very well in practice. There's too many subpar implementations in too many devices. Just because you have a good one in your handset doesn't help when most of the limited ones available in public are cheap.
There's a damn good reason Apple hasn't included NFC. It's broken. They definitely put out crappy products from time to time (don't forget Ping, iPod socks, Maps, Siri, MobileMe, and about 300 variations of the Mac before Jobs came back). But NFC hasn't proven to be something useful or valuable. They won't include it. Perhaps something like it in the future, but never NFC in its current form.
Source: http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/videos/#video-touch
I think the reason it hasn't caught on here is because municipalities, malls, theme parks, etc., haven't embraced the technology, so there's no need for it to be in our phones.
The top search results for "nfc asia" and "nfc hong kong" mainly return press releases and news articles about how NFC is being rolled out. In fact, most of the ones I found are as recent as July and August.
There was one older story from April 2011 talking about "hundreds of field trials" but no follow-on detail.
I'm not doubting that certain markets in major Asian cities have seen NFC rollouts. But I question a) the scale and b) the public reception. Indeed, since smart phones are still catching on in major markets in many Asian markets I am doubtful of how wide-spread NFC adoption actually can be.
I'd love to see some specific stories that refute my point of view.
Train stations in mainland China use something similar, though I'm basing this only my experience with one city, but a big one at that (Guangzhou).
Part of the reason why you aren't finding more accounts of successful NFC rollouts in Asia might be because you aren't searching in the local languages.
Purely anecdotal, granted, but you asked for stories.
(Personally, I use an iPhone with a Pasmo NFC card duct-taped to the back of it.)
But all kinds of phones have NFC and can be used for trains and buying stuff.
The strength of phone NFC seems to be that it's basically a "smart card on your phone," and smart cards as a payment method are extremely common in places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc., largely driven by their ubiquity in the form of mass-transit cards (Suica, Pasmo, Octopus, etc).
Far more people have smart cards than have smartphones in these places, and so offering smart-card-compatible NFC functionality on phones seems a no-brainer.
The result of this is that NFC-on-your-phone has worked for ages in Japan, on all types of phone ("smart" and otherwise, except the iphone), and as it uses a widespread existing infrastructure, there's no real issue with availability.
In other words, NFC is not something that's dependent on smartphone popularity for success; rather smartphones with NFC are simply trying to take advantage of an existing successful system to become more popular.
As for the question "do people use it?" I can't refer you to any "stories" but I can say that I personally see lots of people paying for stuff with their phone.... [The main issue with smartphones seems to be that the iphone doesn't support NFC, and lots of people have iphones...]
MIFARE DESFire comes to mind as one of the more popular cards with encryption, though I do recall there's others as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE#MIFARE_DESFire
And as for it being unreliable: [citation needed]. I've never had problems sending data to another NFC-enabled device. The only time I've ever had it not work was back when phones with non-NXP chipsets first started to appear on the market, and some folks were still selling standalone tags that used NXP's older proprietary format (MIFARE Classic) rather than the standardized format (NFC Forum). That's rarely a problem these days.
The lower level stuff and NDEF format is well standardized. The higher level operations are not nearly as well standardised right now, even more so when you're dealing with large files, which will require a handoff to Bluetooth or WiFi Direct.
In NFC's defense, it's only recently (4.2, Jelly Bean) that Android even supported transferring large files via Bluetooth handoff, so hopefully that stuff will improve with time.
I've personally never had it work. I tried twice with different two phones (Motorola and Samsung) and while it did recognize it was supposed to do something NFC-esque, the data never transferred. At that point I gave up and just swapped SD-cards and manually copied the data over.
Just my experience but I'm not interested in trying again when there are other methods that I know will transfer data guaranteed to work.
On the flip side, adding the extra hardware to a tag to support encryption has a non-trivial cost. (NFC tags are limited by both storage space and power.) If you're doing mass production of tags, that cost adds up very quickly.
For gaming - imagine a game console with mix-and-match one-handed controllers. Trackballs, joysticks, pointers, keyboards, mice, etc. Bump them together to tell the console "I'm using the whamblefloog with the xorchball" so it can tie each disparate controller to the concept of a two-handed player.
[1] http://www.interac.ca/en/interac-flash/interac-flash-for-con...
And vending machines, and convenience stores, etc.
I would be willing to bet, in the eternal rotation of the IT wheel, that the next revolution will be something very much like IRDA in your google glass glasses.
Of course it'll be hampered by incompatibility, relatively low uptake, unreliable software, insecurity, probably only supported by certain platforms, and probably an awful and difficult to use UI, so it'll die out. To be replaced by more or less identical short range RF "solution" (and guess how that will turn out?)
There's no reason short range IR or RF can't work at the hardware level. No reason a unified, generic, stable standard can't exist. Other than the whole, lack of need thing.
Look how well bluetooth and wifi work using basically the same technology... because they solved actual problems.
For a technology that's supposed to make sharing data so quick and easy, it seems like a really bad sign that I have not been able to make it work even once, despite sitting there fiddling with it for probably 20 minutes. It's like someone looked at the extremely painful and ill-defined bluetooth pairing user experience and said, "yeah, that's a good starting point, but let's make it a little more frustrating."
Apple and the US market aren't the entire universe. NFC is already used in other countries for secure communication (payments, ID, etc), but that's not even one of the most interesting aspects of it.
I will stick to Bump, since that's the subject of the topic: when I checked a couple of years ago, their way of connecting two devices was primitive and rather insecure, it was essentially a heuristic that used several parameters to guess which two users "bumped". NFC would have solved the problem perfectly, with no network communication needed and 100% user-to-user match rate.
They (were?) using a patented algorithm working on accelerometer signals to figure out which devices were being "bumped" together server-side.
Are iPod Socks really considered a failed product?
[1]: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com
read, Google will likely be shutting down our services within the next 6 months.
A few years ago a bunch of users in an BBS were playing with the app by bumping alone and see who the algorithm would pick as a match in their town. I guess it got better, but at that time you had something like a one in five chance to get a match in downtown areas.
Dunno if that was actually the case though.
http://www.google.com/patents/US20110191823
Looks like they took out some patents on fixed buttons as well.
http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts&hl=en&q=inassigne...
But then, you go on to speculate not just that it's probably not technically difficult, just "clever", and then go even further to speculate that it's probably "not exactly a technology that seems worth acquiring." Are you asking questions in good faith or are you making claims? What you wrote here seems less a genuine question and more a post to downplay bump's work and their acquisition as worthy.
I can go on, but if you can't imagine it being difficult, then your imagination needs work!
I think the hard part of their patented algorithm would be to use data from the accelerometer - basically the only thing that can be 'trusted' - to match bumps up through the unique bumping signature/characteristics. Actually - since it's patented it should be public record, so we could go look it up.
Now what is note-worthy here is that the signatures wouldn't be "identical". They may not even be opposite as i think the idea is to bump your HANDS while holding them, so the hands may distort the vibrations. So the fact that they actually managed it to WORK is astounding.
Here is a view of the web interface that I would use to demo/test the API: http://i.imgur.com/tQA35U8.png
I still can't figure out a product for the thing, but if you have an idea, hit me up :)
The site needs a big UI and workflow revamp (already worked out on paper) and won't scale right now (it just uses a single instance of Meteor and a MongoDB database and doesn't handle Internet-scale abuse.)
You can see the current iteration at http://www.near.im/.
Yeah, the UI is ugly and overly complicated right now. It is really more of a technical demo and a project for me to experiment with Meteor on at this point (it has zero active users.)
I am presently requiring a login to post to (in theory) prevent flooding it with spam. The person who is receiving the message does not need to log in. I have thought about removing the Facebook login requirement either for now (when there aren't many users) or permanently (need to have a way to prevent spam.)
If was already on your phone I could see users adopting it for things like contacts & photo exchange.
Sad what this industry is coming to.
I met some Bump folk a year ago. The company had a lot of employees and still wasn't making any money.
They basically burnt all their investors money. Calling this an acquisition is bending the truth.
Umm. Google bought them - that's an acquisition no matter if they are making money or not (unless "acquisition" has been redefined somehow)
Someone glancing at the headline would assume this was a successful exist for a YCombinator backed company.
However, perhaps any remaining cash was returned to the original investors, less costs of liquidation, and any assets were "sold" to Google for $1 with some of the development team moving to Google as temporary contractors or probationary hires, rather than immediate permanent hires.
It seems that investors are now scared of failing, losing money and the impact on reputation, so they want to preserve their mythical image as Titans of Silicon Valley (much like investment bankers believed they were Masters of the Universe) for as long as possible. Thus they come up with dubious acquisitions, acquihires and mask strategic failure as pivoting.