What can you do with only a mobile phone in your pocket?
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How many times have you left home checking if your keys, wallet and mobile are with you? You can soon bring your mobile phone only. Telenor’s researchers are testing possibilities and business models of mobile contactless services in the NFC City project.
The Fitness Guide is implemented as a poster depicting the body and the main muscle groups. Put your NFC equipped phone close to the selected muscle group and you will get recommendation of exercises
The project, as its name says, created a mini NFC city in a student campus in Tromsø, Norway, and invited 50 students to test a number of NFC based services. The aim was to move NFC services from labs to real life setting, in order to get feedback from users, and to explore the related eco-system and business models.
In an on-going trial the students can replace their bus tickets, house keys and pocket money with their mobile phone. By using NFC tags, they get location specific information about the arrival time of the next bus, today’s menu at the cantina, tonight’s events at the campus or TripAdvisor. There is also the NFC Fitness Guide that provides them with videos, textual and oral training instructions.
Some tags can provide context sensitive information on an individual level. An example is a tag placed outside a lecture room, that enables only to enrolled students to get information or download materials for the lecture. Besides the retrieval of information, the students are now able to use their Samsung Galaxy S3 phone with NFC technology for file transfers and they are trained in programming their own NFC tags.
NFC City in Schrödingers katt, NRK (Norwegian National Television)
Simplifying customers’ everyday tasks
The trial period started in September 2012 and ends in June 2013. During and after this period, through data mining and surveys, interviews and focus groups – the project will uncover the actual use of the NFC services and the motivations behind, and also try to catch eventual behavioural changes and impact on the users’ everyday life.
“We believe that NFC technologies can simplify our customers’ everyday tasks and offer increased convenience in access to services” says Sigmund Akselsen, project manager. “Telenor intends to take a leading role in supporting the NFC value system. To do so we need to understand other actors’ interests, and that is why the NFC City project is run together with a number of research partners“, he continues. It is important to explore Telenor’s strategic position in such a value system and to identify sustainable business models for all actors involved.
Designing a total NFC experience: new services
The main services described above are part of the initial project plan. However, the ideas for new NFC services and application areas are still considered. In order to spur creativity, four service design students from Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) were invited to contribute. They ran a series of workshops addressing the students’ leisure activities, in particular those located at the “Students’ House”. Based on this insight they suggested new NFC services to solve main challenges or provide appealing add-ons. Some of the suggested services are: “Personalised NFC access keys”, “Tap to get working routines”, “Tap to book and receive tickets”, “Tap to add pictures for decorating walls or songs to music list”, etc.
“A service design process should be inspired by a wish to give the users good experiences over time and across different touch points”, they proclaimed. This attitude fits well with Telenor’s ambitions. The collaboration matched an already established link between Telenor and AHO within the Centre for Service Innovation. The AHO students fulfilled our expectations, says Bente Evjemo who supported AHO in organising the workshops in Tromsø. “The atmosphere of the workshops was the very best – a result of a clever facilitation, good timing and accommodating locations”.
Contactless payment and beyond
When NFC technologies are discussed much attention is given to NFC as a tool for mobile payment and transport ticketing. Telenor is together with Norway’s largest bank, DNB, about to launch a payment service based on experiences from a successful NFC payment trial in 2011, involving 250 customers and 14 outlets in central parts of Oslo.
With the NFC City project Telenor is researching innovative NFC services beyond the payment function, taking the leading role in testing, and eventually developing diverse NFC based services, functionality, user interfaces and business models.