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NFC award finalist Hotel Nova chooses Innovision Topaz™ NFC tag to enable the digital traveller

Innovision Research & Technology’s Topaz Near Field Communication (NFC) tag could soon be helping to make life easier and more convenient for business travellers around the world, by enabling them to book hotel rooms, check in, pay for services and check out using their mobile phones.

The Hotel Nova application developed by the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, France, was a finalist in Europe’s first NFC competition, ‘Touching the Future’, held at the NFC Developers Summit in Monaco in April 2007. Hotel Nova was runner-up in Track B – ‘Most Innovative NFC Proposal of the Year 2007’.

Hotel Nova is being developed as part of the ‘Digital Traveller’ joint project between the University of Nice’s MBDS (Multimedia Interactive Bases de Données et Intégration de Systèmes) and leading travel service provider Amadeus. It enables business travellers to use NFC-enabled mobile phones to book a hotel room, check in, access their room and other hotel facilities, purchase additional goods and services, and check out – saving time spent queuing, removing the need to carry different confirmations for different services and making the whole experience more convenient by including it all on the mobile phone.

When the user books a hotel room (using either a mobile phone or PC), a text message reply is sent that contains an embedded application with details of the booking. To check in, the guest simply holds his or her phone up to a reader at the check-in desk, or a special kiosk, and receives an electronic room key. A virtual ‘credit card’ is also enabled on the phone, which can be used to pay for the restaurant meals, minibar contents or films, for example. On departure, the guest can check out using his or her phone at the kiosk.

In the Hotel Nova application, Topaz NFC tags would be used to provide links to information and services around the hotel. For example, a tag attached to a restaurant poster would contain an identifier that provides a link to the hotel booking system to enable guests to reserve a table directly from the phone.

The advantage of this approach is that information stored on the hotel’s server – which could be on-site or located at a central data store – can be quickly and easily updated without having to change the tag data.

It’s all in the tag

In mass-market businesses like the travel industry, the cost and performance of the NFC tag are crucial, as Thomas de Lazzari, project manager at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, explains, “The potential for NFC technology in the travel business is huge, as there are numerous opportunities for automation and enhancing the customer experience.

“What all of these potential applications have in common, however, is the need to provide an attractive balance between cost and performance,” adds de Lazzari. “NFC tags must be able to store sufficient information at the right price point in this highly competitive industry.”

The Topaz tag, designed and developed by UK-based Innovision Research & Technology, is mandated by the NFC Forum as the Type 1 NFC tag. It is able to store 96 bytes (equating to 96 or more characters) of information, which means that relatively long identifiers or web addresses can be stored along with other data if required.

NFC is set for widespread adoption in a whole range of applications. It makes people’s lives easier and more convenient by building on existing systems and human behaviour. It will make accessing new media and content services more intuitive; make it easier to pay for things; easier to discover, synchronize and share information; and easier to use transport and other public services.

Background on NFC tag types

In June 2006, the NFC Forum introduced standardized technology architecture, initial specifications and tag formats for NFC-compliant devices. These include the Data Exchange Format (NDEF) and three initial Record Type Definition (RTD) specifications for smart poster, text and Internet resource reading applications.

In addition, the NFC Forum announced the initial set of four tag formats that all NFC Forum standard-compliant devices must support. These are based on ISO 14443 Types A and B (the international standards for contactless smartcards) and FeliCa (conformant with the ISO 18092, passive communication mode, standard). Tags compatible with these mandatory formats are available initially from Innovision, Philips, and Sony, and more than one billion tags of this kind have already been deployed globally, albeit for non-NFC applications like mass transit and access control.

The NFC Forum chose the initial tag formats to cater for the broadest possible range of applications and device capabilities:

· Type 1 is based on ISO 14443 A and is currently available exclusively from Innovision Research & Technology (Topaz). It has a 96-byte memory capacity

· Type 2 is also based on ISO 14443 A and is currently exclusively available from NXP (MUL).

· Type 3 is based on FeliCa and is currently exclusively available from Sony. It has a larger memory (currently 2kbyte) and operates at a higher data rate (212kbit/s)

· Type 4 is fully compatible with ISO 14443A/B, a typical product example would offer large memory-addressing capability with read speeds of between 106kbit/s and 424kbit/s.

Type 1/2 tags and Type 3/4 tags are two very different groups, with different memory capacities. There is little overlap in the types of applications they are likely to be used for.

All tag types can be either read/write or read only, however whilst types 1 and 2 can be switched between states by the user, the read/write state of types 3 and 4 are defined by the manufacturer at the time of manufacture and cannot be changed once in the field.

About the European NFC competition

Called ‘Touching the Future’, the first European NFC competition took place on 18/19 April at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco. Launched by the NFC Forum (www.nfc-forum.org) in partnership with the SmartTouch project (www.smarttouch.org), the competition is designed to promote innovation and excellence in NFC service implementations throughout Europe. Sponsors included Nokia and Innovision Research & Technology.

Addressing this year’s theme of ‘The Simplicity of Touch’, 50 high-quality submissions from 13 countries focused on innovation, commercial potential and usability, as well as the design and implementation of NFC technology. Twenty-one finalists made the final cut and ten awards were handed out; the two overall winners – one in each Track (Track A for current NFC solutions and Track B for future uses of NFC) – and eight runners-up.