Bring New Functionality to Your NFC Enabled Device with Samsung’s Programmable TecTiles

NFC or Near Field Communication is a relatively new feature built in to cell phones, but the technology has been around for quite some time. You might be a bit more familiar with it in another form; your credit/debit card. Whenever you see someone tap their credit or debit card at a cashier, gas station, etc. instead of swiping it, that’s essentially them using a form of NFC. In phones, this technology is still mainly focused as a way to make payments.

Paypal and other payment processing companies have developed ways to use the NFC to tap phones together to send payments to one another and Google developed Google Wallet as a way to try and mainstream the use of NFC’s for payments (here in New York City, you can use your Google Wallet enabled device to pay at places like CVS and even in taxi cabs). Even though payments seemed to be the way to begin with NFC, I’ve been waiting for a long time for someone to start showing off it’s true potential. Finally, that wait seems like it might be over soon.

Samsung has announced TecTiles. These small stickers can be placed anywhere and when someone uses their NFC enabled device to tap the sticker it can be programmed to do any number of commands on the device that tapped it. These commands range from changing device settings, bringing up webpages, launching apps, using social networks, etc. Check out Samsung’s demonstration video for some examples of how this might be useful.

Personally, I think these sort of stickers will start to replace all the QR codes we see at business and on advertisements (at least of of them that you can reach with your phone) since they are much easier to interact with (no need to open up a specific app and try and line up the shot, just tap and go).

Anyone else see the potential these guys might have?

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