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 in various ways. 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.
When I was living in japan people were swiping their phones to get drinks from vending machines and getting through train station gates. Was that NFC technology that they were using? I was so amazed when I first saw it, it made me think Australia was so far behind. LOL
It is a great idea this NFC thing. A lot of potential business opportunities can arise as result of this new technology.
The number of NFC handset types in Australia is already hitting 10.
In addition to the above 4 we have the Blackberry Bold 9900, Blackberry 9960, Nokia N9, Nokia C7, the 4G Samsung Galaxy SII and the LG 3.0 Prada phone.
Lots more coming this year also. 2012 is shaping up to be the turning point for NFC.
Dave Cunningham
Director
http://www.tapit.com.au
So Matty, did you make it on to the leaderboard??.
NFC is a feature that i am strangely intrigued by and really want to have on my next phone… i do just love its simplicity and functionality… but that is a sad list of NFC enabled phones on the market.
Really sad that HTC hasn’t snuck NFC onto the One S for good measure, sadness!!