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.

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.

Americans fond of small? Since when?

I have visited USA Orlando RFIDjournal live and found a US-based NFC tag supplier providing very tiny NFC Tags, the smallest one is just 4mm in diameter. It is called Infochip. Their product can apply on metals directly, primarily on industrial lifting tools, such as hooks, hoist rings, clamps, etc. The tag encapsulation is designed to withstand impacts, pressure, chemical and corrosion exposure. With the amazing 4mm diameter and unbreakably robust feature, it sounds very interesting so far.

However, the 4mm diameter NFC tag is so small that its RF signal almost impossible for typical NFC smartphone to pick up. That's why here come with another clever device called SNIPER. The Sniper is placed on the antenna of the NFC smartphone. And when the SNIPER pointer hit the tiny little NFC tag, the RF signal power is focused and redirected to the NFC smartphone….

It is a good application because all serious lifting cables and tools require periodically checking and maintenance. It is hard to do without any identification methods. Great potential and good choice of technology. The tiny NFC tag can be installed inside a hole.

The Sniper is a clever design too…but how to mount the Sniper security on each NFC phone (so many size and brands not to mention the sneaky antenna position, becomes a real headache. I suggest they can seek for collaboration with this company, to develop a new SNIPER on 3.5mm mic. Because that's the only universal standard feature in mobile world.

Using a NFC mobile phone and a piece of sniper to really tiny NFC tags….it might not fit the greesy and muddy industrial or constructional sites, but it is surely useful for cable and lifting maintenance service providers in labs or offices.