Non-payment applications come out on top in Forum competition

Interactive Research & Development’s medical system and VTT Technical Research Centre’s social networking concept picked up first place prizes in the NFC Forum’s Global Competition.

PRIZES: The winners of the NFC Forum Global Competition 2009 were announced at an awards ceremony in Monaco on April 23
PRIZES: The winners of the NFC Forum Global Competition 2009 were announced at an awards ceremony in Monaco on April 23

The winners of this year’s NFC Forum Global Competition have been announced. First, second, and third-place winners in a Commercial Track and a Research Track were chosen by a jury of academics and industry professionals from a shortlist of 20 finalists.

In the Commercial Track:

  • First place was given to Interactive Research & Development of Pakistan, for its Interactive Alerts for Childhood Pneumonia system, a real-time patient tracking and referral system for use in low-resource settings. The system is currently being used for a pneumonia surveillance study for young children in Karachi, Pakistan.
  • Second place went to German firm Servtag for Friendticker.com, an NFC-based mobile social ticker that allows users to share their geographical location with friends by touching Friendticker NFC stickers in restaurants and bars.
  • Third place went to Nordea for its NFC-based strong end-user authentication solution for online banking, which enables secure access to an online banking site via an NFC-enabled handset and a dual-interface bank card.

And in the Research Track:

  • First place went to Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre for Hot in the City, a mobile social media service that uses NFC-enabled mobile phones as a friend connection platform.
  • Second place went to the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), Faculty of Electrical Engineering for Touch to Communicate, which allows a consumer who has difficulty communicating to manage phone calls with a simple touch between a mobile device and passive electronic tags.
  • Third place went to ETH Zurich for the APriori NFC-based mobile application, which supports consumer purchasing decisions by interacting with tagged products to deliver point-of-sale product ratings.

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One comment on this article

  1. interesting to see that NFC is not simply about PayPass and Visa Wave. I see the intrigue of these neat applications. Yet, what we really need to see is the income/revenue/profit if NFC is going to happen.

    If I had the funds and the leverage what I would want to see happen is that we start merging our leather wallet/purse with our electronic gizmo then use NFC to accept electronic copies of invoices at the grocery store, enter the gym, open the door at the office, pass through security at the airport, pay for everything, load coupons and everything else that I do with my leather wallet.

    One, not many, is where the answer lies. Then the consumer will pay and the revenues will flow.

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