Smart Touch Will Revolutionize How We Use Our Mobiles

19-10-2007
You're sitting on the bus, bored. There is a sticker on the window, advertising a new game. You touch the sticker with your phone and the game is yours. Your account is also debited immediately. You're still sitting on the bus, but now having fun with the new game.

This could soon be part of your everyday life, just like updating a photo of your children in the picture frame on your desk simply by touching the frame with your camera phone. In Oulu, you can already pay your bus fare with your mobile and use it as the ticket when you board.

A revolution like the Internet

Smart touch is based on a technology called Near Field Communication (NFC) and it is changing the way we use mobile phones. With NFC, mobile communication requires no more than a touch. NFC devices have an RFID reader, which recognizes a corresponding tag embedded, for example, in an object. "With NFC, you can start a service or gather and distribute information. This will change our daily lives almost as much as the Internet has," says Heikki Huomo, who is Technology Director of the British company Innovision Research & Technology. Huomo has been called the father of NFC and for good reason, too. Before joining Innovision Research & Technology, he led a research team at Nokia, which explored ubiquitous communication and associated issues. He was also the technical architect in the development of the first two NFC phones.

Paying first

"At the moment, the progress and breakthrough of NFC depends largely on decisions regarding common standards and rules taken by the different players," Huomo says. The new technology is actively discussed on the industry's open NFC Forum. It currently has some 150 members, including device manufacturers, telecoms, content producers, and credit card companies. Huomo believes that NFC will become widespread in a few years. Mobile paying in particular can advance the technology because it is a more secure solution than magnetic cards, for example. "It is likely that the first breakthrough will happen in China where there are still neither magnetic nor chip cards," says Huomo.

The time is now

NFC offers companies of different kinds and sizes innumerable new business opportunities. Now is the time to act. "For mobile phones today, smart touch is more or less the same as the introduction of the graphic internet browser was for computers; more people will use more mobile services when it becomes easy enough," says Huomo. He says that NFC services are most advanced in payments and public transportation. Telecoms and the major mobile device OEMs are also playing an active role.

Read more from ITEA's (Information Technology for European Advancement) Smart Touch Newsletter.