How to DIY NFC Retro Charm Phone Plug

Making retro charms became a trend these days. The charms look nice and are really easy to make. The materials are also readily available through Taobao.
This time, I also tried to make a retro charms but it's different from others - its a NFC retro charm. I hid a NFC on-metal sticker into the charm and wrote a Youtube video link into it so my phone can play a lullaby from Youtube with a tap of the charm. It's also with a phone plug so I can plug it to my phone to bring it with me.

And the NFC on-metal stickers can be bought here.

McDonalds' Happy Table for Children

Singapore McDonalds have just started a Happy Table campaign for children to have fun. Those Happy Table have hidden NFC tags to form a "NFC race track". When the children have a NFC phone, they can enjoy the NFC-McDonalds racing game. The game itself seems great and the graphics look nice. I wonder if naughty children will mess up, and if the trays on the table will block the way of the "racing cars"... but I still believe that there is a potential as children should be interested in the game.

Tell the Plasma What You Want Using Your Phone

I've heard that the Shibuya Clickable Project will be having interaction between the outdoor TVs and the mobile phones... but seems that they are yet to implement this to their system.

On the other side of the planet, I mean Australia, oOh media set up interactive screens in airports for travellers. To start using the screen, they have to tap their phone to the NFC tag or QR code. Then they can select the content to be shown on the big screen and download many different things - movies, magazines, books... anything you can say from the Google Play store. This should be really useful to people in airport, as they always love to grab something to kill their time on the flight.

Simple App for You to Manage Your NFC Tags - NFC Doctor

There are now many NFC apps on the Play Store, and NFC Doctor is one of the simplest ones to use.

The functions of the NFC Doctor are made clear on its first page – reading, writing and cleaning NFC tags. When you read a NFC tag with the app, you can see the data, type and state of the tag. I tried to use the app to read my tag and saw its data on 'tag data in hex' page and understood that its a rewritable 168bytes Mifare Ultralight C tag from the 'access condition' and 'tag information' page. Such information should be useful for the advanced users.

We can also use the app for writing URL, plain text or application launcher into my NFC tags. It let me to write tag from records in the history so its quite convenient for me to write the same content into many tags.

It has 2 options for us to clear data from our tags. Just randomly choose one of them when you need to clear data. When it has finished clear your tag, it will display a detailed clearing result.

Innovative-marketing Series 1 : Fast food delivery

Here I would like to do some BBOOOM!.....a Brainstorming on NFC applications, inspired by some NFC news worldwide.

Reference Link:
Domino's readies nationwide NFC summer campaign

Domino's App: Google Play

Why not make a NFC sticker on a pizza cutter, or fork or spoon for Fastest pizza order using smartphone?

Customers can tap on the NFC tag to quick dial pizza order hotline without any APP. OR...customer can tap on the tag and link to a mobile-website to place order. OR...customer tap on the tag and get launch the app to do the ordering with GPS-location or address information. Customer can also accumulate points and redeem rewards

NFC-enabled Promotion Items help customer
- quick dial
- quickly place order
- no need to spell out tedious ADDRESS
- earn loyalty scheme and redeem prizes

Of course, we can still include QR codes on any printed materials to fit with i-device users.

Step-by-step Guide in NFC-Facebook Marketing (2)

Last time I introduced the way to link up your Facebook Page or photo to NFC tags. This time it would be about they way to initiate people to share your contents to their own timeline. The principle is similar but this time is a bit more complicated. This is again a step-by-step guide:

1. Make sure that you have installed Google URL Shortener and an NFC app which can write URL to NFC tags.

2. Open your mobile web browser. This time not necessarily loading Facebook. Just browse any website you want others to share.

3. In front of your URL, add a string of text "facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?m2w&u="

4. Press the "Share" button, share the long URL to Google URL Shortener and generate a shortened URL.

5. Press "Share URL" button in the Google URL Shortener. This time, share the shortened URL to the NFC app you have installed, and write it to your NFC tag.

6. (optional) If you also need a QR code for your URL, just go back to Google URL Shortener and press "Share QR code".

When you read the tag with your phone, you will a share dialog for your website. However, the dialog is the desktop version, instead of the mobile version of Facebook. It might not look well but when people press the "Share" button there, your website will be posted to their timeline.

I used the desktop version, by including the "m2w" element in the URL, as the mobile version of Facebook doesn't support sharing with this kind of URL. In case Facebook support it later, we will just need to add "facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=" in step 3.

Step-by-step Guide in NFC-Facebook Marketing (1)

Facebook never can be missed in SNS marketing. Almost everybody are just keep inviting people to like their Facebook Page so that their information will be shown on others' Facebook news feed.

This time, I will tell you how to link up your Facebook Page or photos on your Facebook Page to NFC tags. Then, when people read your NFC tags, their phones will show your Facebook Page or photos automatically, such that you can easily invite them to like you. And here comes my step-by-step guide:

1. Make sure that you have installed Google URL Shortener and an NFC app which can write URL to NFC tags.

2. Basic NFC-Facebook marketing starts with using mobile web browser to browse Facebook. Open your mobile web browser and load your Facebook Page / photo.

3. Now its likely that you can see a long URL in your browser, especially if your are browsing Facebook photo. That URL is too long to be written to most of the NFC tags so you need this step - press the "Share" button, share the long URL to Google URL Shortener and generate a shortened URL.

4. Press "Share URL" button in the Google URL Shortener. This time, share the shortened URL to the NFC app you have installed, and write it to your NFC tag.

5. (optional) If you also need a QR code for your URL, just go back to Google URL Shortener and press "Share QR code".

Iron Man NFC Phone Case

I found this Iron Man phone case really cool. It make use of the power of the NFC signal from the phone to light up itself. You can see this when NFC is on, it keeps flashing. And when the phone is reading information from a NFC tag, it keeps lighting up. Then when you have a NFC tag with you, you can play with your phone case just like the person in the video did.

The company selling the phone case said that they will release more MARVEL hero phone cases later. I guess those will also look very nice.

NFC in Libraries

I have heard of using NFC in libaries before but I didn't really know how we can actually use it. Then on Monday, Fujitsu announced the Japan first NFC library system and it is used in a public libary in Hanno-shi, somewhere near Tokyo.

As shown in the video, they have a NFC tag for book categories and some of the authors. When visitors tap the NFC tag, they can see information of the books for both books on the shelf and books being borrowed. If the book they are interested is not on the shelf, they can reserve the book right away.

The tags are also linked to an online platform for people to search information from databases and Wikipedia. They claimed that this can help people to find the information they need for solving their problems but I am not sure if this is really useful when the monitor size is limited... I prefer to use PC for such searching.

If you are really interested about the system, you can see more about it here.