The FLASHING LED deco nail

Typical deco nails can no longer satisfy ladies on pursuing beauty on their fingernail. And now even mobile technologies can also play a part in improving the shininess of the deco nails. This is one of the latest applications of NFC technology which we can be defined as a perfect combination of beauty and technology.

Today, we are going to share about a latest décor on your fingernails, using NFC to trigger extra-shiny effect. Please study this carefully before you’re lost in front of your girlfriend/wife who is showing off her LED blinking fingernail.

This is the little chip that provides flashing LED on deco nail, the deco nail that will light up when your fingers place near NFC working devices (or any 13.56MHz RF field). Basically, it is just a simple tuned antenna coil with a LED.

 Size of the chip

A 0.5mm thick NFC tag embedded, enables your nail flashing when you using your phone, making your payment at POS terminal or entering office/home with your contactless card.

Flashing…Flashing…Flashing…

The LED light can actually keep lightin up, if other NFC chips that with IC are

near

    

FAQ

***To handle the endless question asked by your dearest girlfriend about the chip***

***EVERY gentleman is highly recommended to read the following***

As you may wonder,

Will it be dangerous to put a NFC & LED chip inside your deco nail?

I can say that it is nearly impossible to trigger any accident as there is no battery inside. And I don’t think the chip embedded in deco nail poses more threats than the colouring pigment on top in daily life.

Will the nail be hot if it keeps flashing?

It is claimed that “As no energy is required or generated, your nail will keep blinking without emitting any heat.

Will the NFC function drains my phone’s battery?
Switching on the NFC function for a whole day will only cost <5% of your phone’s battery.

Will the NFC embedded in the nail affect other devices that using NFC (e.g. octopus, access card, payment card……)?

As the NFC embedded in the deco nail doesn’t contain any IC chip. That’s mean your flashing nail will not affect the function of other NFC devices.

Things you should know

1.         NFC only works when your mobile phone is unlocked.

2.         Passive-type NFC only works on android smartphone, so if you are iPhone (any, include 6/6+) user, you can ignore this by now or you can send your complaint to Apple on why they locked up the NFC.

3.         LED deco nail also works on any proximity card reader that uses 13.56MHz.

4.         If you are using your phone, texting or playing games…. You cannot see your flashing nails since your fingers are the back of the phone.

5.         To get the best and brightest flashes, your fingers should put closely to where the NFC smartphone antenna is located (different from model to model)

6.         The only function of this LED chip is flashing only. No other use (interacting with NFC apps/storing data…..) is available.

Other use

If you are a non-deco nail user, you can stick this LED chip to anywhere you want (access card, payment card……), it will light up when it is near any NFC reader.

Normally, it can work on Octopus, contactless access card of your home, office….. I can sure that the LED chip will not affect the function of your card.

In our test, our octopus card can be read by the tablet successfully with the LED light blinking.

BUT sometimes there may be special cases that the chip doesn’t work well. It depends on different versions of octopus card (different versions of octopus have different structure) and different types of reader that your card and LED chip reacted with.

Just like that, it will flash when your Octopus is placed near NFC reader   

If you are interested I n NFC or you want to know more about other NFC products, please feel free to visit our webpage: https://www.nfc-shop.net/                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Tiny NFC Tag Challenge

Size does matter, in NFC's world, larger label size  is everything, even more important then large memory size. Good NFC scanning experience is most important.

However, today I will demostrate several types of tiny NFC tag and provide some hints reading them.These tiny tags are quite useful to apply on small objects, such as tools and jewellery.

How Korean use NFC? Can I cook rice without rice cooker App?

Watch this program Korea Report, and you will be inspired by innovative Korean.  (Be patient about the ad before show)

To read the original text: http://sbscnbc.sbs.co.kr/read.jsp?pmArticleId=10000580232




It covers a lot!

• Payment, Wifi/BT pairing (...yawn.......)
• Electronic appliances, yes, they do have refrigerator App, Rice Cooker APP!!!  washing machines App!!  (goto 3:30 )
• Museum Art Display!

AMAZING! Soon, smartphone mobile can make and feed us with kimbap (Korean rice roll) !!

How pottery studio can makes use of NFC/QR in their masterpiece gallery?

You may find out the writer of this blog like ceramic and pottery so much. Yes, we even tried to chip the ceramic plate before the heating process, of course we failed.

Here, this is a much more simple NFC/QR code application, actually, it is similar with the museum guided tour, or Audio guide.

I went to the pottery lesson sometimes ago and I remember that the Pottery Master Alan Lai has so many great pieces that worth to tell. And that's how I helped Alan to create the ARTHOME Smartposter that linked to facebook, and some name plates for these masterpieces.

We don't get into too commercial, after all, it is a art gallery. So, I didn't use the analytic function to track the number of taps, and track the trends for each week, each months, even we can do so.

I introduced it to a number of visitors, and they really love it.

Special thanks to the great help of Kitty.

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.

See how Japanese Educate Users about NFC

Education is very important for NFC technology. Although most of the Android phones on the market are NFC-enabled, it just seems that most of the phone users are not awared of the usefulness of NFC.

A mobile accessory company in Japan understands what the users don't know and is trying the teach them through illustrated guides. I guess most of you don't know their language but I believe every one of you can understand what they want to express through the illustrations.

For the guides they have, I think the most interesting one is this. They teach you how to make a key chain using their templates and kits so that elderly can phone relatives, hospital or emergency service when they tap their phone with the key chain. And they also teach you to make a magnet (with their nicely designed icon templates and kits) and smart poster (this one is with a tutorial video).

NFC Sticker on Direct Mail Cards

I found the NFC Direct Mail Cards, again from a Japanese company, to be quite interesting. These cards have peelable NFC sticker on them and I guess these cards might become the future way of promotion for companies delivering their merchandise.

I like the pizza example from the seller as pizza is great as we all want ordering pizza to be as convenient as possible. To enjoy the convenient pizza ordering service, we have to peel the NFC sticker out from the card and stick the NFC sticker to a convenient place beforehand. I think sticking it beside the TV would be nice but metal surfaces like the fridge should not be OK. When we feel like having a pizza, we just have to tap the sticker, then the phone will automatically call the pizza restaurant for our hungry tummies.

Message Coaster as Wedding Souvenir

I believe everybody wants to have something special for their wedding souvenir. And a Japanese company developed a nice idea of embedding NFC technology in wedding message coaster. The message coasters not only look nice but include a bookmark to video message from the couple.

I like both their Japanese style design and nice texture of their material. For most of the NFC goods, including the Pokemon NFC figures, their design is not smooth and completeness is not high but these wedding message coasters just look perfect.

The service was displayed in the smartphone and mobile EXPO in Tokyo and is limited in Japan. It's really a pity. If its available in my home country, I would definitely recommend it to my friends.

Dream Aquarium Takeaway?

I love looking at the tropical fishes swimming freely in water but there are not many aquariums near my home so it's difficult for me to see them frequently. However, I found out an interesting Japanese app that can let me build up my own aquarium and visit it anytime I like.

With the app, when I visit an aquarium, I can add the fishes there to the aquarium in my phone and decorate it let it be my 'Dream Aquarium'. The decoration is simple - just to choose background image and add objects but it looks nice. And the app can be ran even after I leave the real aquarium!

It's a sad thing that the app works only when the aquarium is supporting it. Both Sunshine Aquarium in Tokyo and Kaiyukan in Osaka held campaign with the app a few months before...but there is no aquariums currently supporting the app. Hope that I will have a chance to visit an aquarium supporting the app in the future.

Answer the Door Even When You are Out

You might not always have someone to visit your home but it won't be a nice thing when you miss any of the visits. Sometimes, may be our neighbour or other people came by and left because we were not at home.

Now here is an application to help us to answer the door even when we are out. What we have to do with it is simple - load a NFC sticker with the app and stick it at your door. When visitor came by, they can read the sticker with their phone, then their phone will automatically phone or message you. With the notification, we can contact the visitor right away and will not miss any of the visitors. Of course, you can also choose not to answer the door when you don't feel like it.

Let the NFC Tag Tell You How Healthy Your Dog is

A Japanese company is helping busy dog owners to know more about how healthy their dog is. They sell a NFC tag to be hanged on dog’s neck and it monitors the health condition of pets 24-hours a day, 365-days a year. And the latest 14-days data in the tag can be synchronized to cloud using smartphone or PC. The tag counts steps taken then we can know how frequent we should walk our dog and prevent dog diabetes. It also counts body shaking of our dog so we can know if its stress level is OK. Other than these, it also records the temperature of the environment.

They have both smartphone app and web portal. Through these platforms, we can upload other info like how much food they have eaten and know about how healthy our pets are by taking a look on the data there. As the data is shown as graphs, it's quite easy to read. And we can write diary and upload photos to the cloud and share them to Facebook or twitter.

NFC lights up LEDs on Teddy

I just made a simple mock up/demo for NFC toys which LED powered by the RF power from smartphone. The NFC tag launched the Tapogram app, and the coil separately lit up 2 LEDs. No battery is needed for Teddy bear. The power is small but enough to trigger wake up for other circuit. We can design a lot other applications which can interact with smartphones.

e.g. toys figure, model, smart poster or banner, board game, etc.