Last night`s launch event for the HTC One X was held at The Carriage Works where HTC showcases the features of the One X. One of the ways that HTC encouraged people to check out the onsite demonstrations of the One X’s Camera and Sense interface was to utilise another feature of the handset, NFC. To this end HTC engaged NFC Marketing company Tapit to create a game of viewing the various demonstrations of the features of the HTC One X.
Tapit issued each of the 500 attendees a personalised NFC enabled wristband which associated their name in the Tapit system, HTC staff then tapped their wristband with an NFC reader after they completed viewing the demonstration and each tap allowed them accrue points over the course of the night. The wristbands were tapped over 4000 times over the course of the two hour event and the live scoreboard showed the top 10 players. The top 8 participants of the night won prizes with the top 4 winning a HTC One X Phone and the next 4 winning Beats Headsets.
Events such as these, which showcase NFC Technology shows that people are willing to start utilising NFC because of its ease of use, simply tapping their phone on an NFC enabled area allows all sorts of excellent marketing opportunities for business looking to differentiate themselves. Matt advised that his wristband when tapped with an NFC enabled phone took the person to the Ausdroid website, this was also personalised for various attendees last night for their individual wristbands.
All in all I think we`re seeing NFC about to take off in Australia, we have the HTC One X , Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus in consumers hands, the Sony Xperia S about to launch, all of which are NFC enabled. We have the Commonwealth Bank looking to launch their Kaching application for Android so I see a lot of business’s looking to utilise NFC technology, Imagine tapping an NFC tag and getting a restaurant menu or a movie trailer delivered to your phone just from one simple tap, these are some of the implementations that are possible and I believe Tapit are working on more, basically it’s an exciting time for NFC.
