The Art and Science of NFC Programming

By Anne-Marie Lesas and Serge Miranda

NFC is a world standard since 2004 which is now within every smartphone on the market. Such a standard enables us to do mobile transactions (mobile payment) in a secure way along with many other information- based tap’n play operations. This book has a double role for computer scientists (from bachelor students in CS to IT professionals).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781119379058

Book preview

Preface

"The primary form of sense is touch, which belongs to all animals. […]

The sense of touch is necessarily the one whose loss causes the death of living beings".

ARISTOTLE

With the near field communication (NFC) standard, an NFC-enabled mobile phone acquires Aristotle’s sense of touch.

NFC is a global standard of contactless and very short field (proximity) communication (a few inches) created by Philips, Sony and Nokia in 2004 (three major players and leaders in consumer electronics). The NFC standard is one of the 16 radiofrequency identification standards bringing a unique identification to each tagged object known since the 1940s and a wireless reading (through radiofrequency). Today NFC, which is widespread in smart cards (for access, payment and transportation), has been universally chosen by all smartphone manufacturers since 2014, thus allowing new mobile phone uses.

This NFC standard has three operating modes: reader/writer, card emulation and peer-to-peer; with a simple touch on an NFC-enabled device, a tap (hence the tap’n play paradigm) on a tag or on another NFC-enabled device, we can:

– collect information thanks to the NFC reader/writer mode;

– connect to another device and initiate connectivity (e.g. Bluetooth®, Wi-Fi, Li-Fi) thanks to the NFC peer-to-peer mode;

– authenticate, open a door or pay, for example, because of the emulation card mode.

An NFC-enabled mobile phone can thus be seen as a universal connector that increases the phone’s sensory capacities. After speaking/listening, reading and viewing (pictures, text messages, e-posts in social networks), thanks to NFC, mobile phones will allow us to touch in order to validate an access, get information, exchange content or pay. This interaction mode, which is non-intrusive and intuitive, leads the way to a portfolio of innovative services.

The NFC smartphone has won the battle of the pocket! Anything which was in your pockets or your purse will now have a dematerialized version in your mobile: cash, debit and credit cards, loyalty program cards, keys, camera, MP3 player, etc. By the end of 2015, half of the planet (3.5 billion people) owned a smartphone, with a sustained deployment growth rate, all the more with Indian advertisements in the beginning of 2016. Half of these smartphones are NFC enabled. This also means that the 2 billion people with no bank account who own a smartphone will be able to benefit from financial services: new mobile payment actors will arise beyond the banks! The banker is…in your pocket!

In biology, life is defined as a pair: information and communication. Thanks to a simple touch, NFC-enabled phones introduce communication toward a remote server carrying the story of this object. Any object with an NFC tag touched by a NFC-enabled mobile phone thus becomes, biologically speaking, a living object. In the future, information systems will have to include this aspect of objects which become living objects.

NFC standard thus allows objects to become living objects, and the places where they are located become smart places: check the virtual user guide of a device, automatically setup an environment and personal preferences, launch a scheduled washing program or open the door of your house with your smartphone with a simple tap, among others, using NFC. Through a simple proximity gesture (less than 1 inch), NFC induces the user’s desire to interact and create a link between the real world and the virtual world to make augmented or diminished reality. The use of NFC-enabled mobile phones is one of the supports allowing the accurate location of a user; in this way, we can envision a portfolio of geolocated, personalized and contextualized services.

NFC-enabled mobile phones are carried by a digital revolution that puts people at the center of the interaction between the real world and the virtual world: the owner of an NFC smartphone potentially becomes a Homo mobiquitus, a communactor, i.e. a data contributor (consumer and producer) to the common space in bottom-up mode [MIR 14a, MIR 14b].

We have reached a new era of information systems at the convergence of mobile phones (which have become computers with smartphones) and the ubiquity of the Internet (which has become social with broadband); we sum up, according to Xavier Dallos, with the portmanteau word mobiquity. All of the economic sector and the three individual spheres (public, private, professional) will be impacted by mobiquity.

With NFC, the following new multidisciplinary concepts have emerged: mobiquity, Homo mobiquitus, communactors, one-tap marketing, mobiquitous tourism (from the former max min to the future mini max), mobiquitous currency (cash is no longer the latest payment link), spiralist innovation, the "Assistants Mobiquitaires InformationnelS (AMIS) (Mobiquitous Informational Assistants) or the mobile cyber cafe" in Haïti.

NFC is a breakthrough innovation leading the way to new services and to new architectures of information systems that bring new business models. Spiralist innovation is at the heart of NFC thinking. As creativity on usage is unlimited, it is up to us to innovate and create new applications with this global NFC standard acting as a universal connector between the real world and the virtual world in a non-intrusive way: the sky is the limit!

Professor Serge MIRANDA

October 2016

Introduction

Based on radiofrequency identification tested during the Second World War, near-field communication (NFC) standards became global in 2004 after several years of prototyping and development.

Beyond the fact that it is an open standard, NFC has many advantages; it is an economic technology enabling dynamic multimodel interaction which can be summarized by 3S: Security, Speed and Simplicity. Just by enabling your smartphone, you are able to interact with the real world and enrich it with all information from the virtual