Today I attended a talk given on a recent Berlin #NFC project, where people used the new Google Nexus S to interact with NFC tags. (later today this will end in a “puzzle game”, which is only interesting to people with NFC enabled devices

I noted the following things from the talk:

- Development along the Android SDK docs is mostly straightforward: Tag recognition can be captured by an app using defined intents (one of the means to enable communication between apps in the android world)

- One of the backsides is that the developer has to think in detail which tech standard for NFC tags ghe wants to use: acccording to the speakers it was difficult, to provide a generic tag content handling.

- Reading out the contents of the new german (NFC-enabled) ID card is technically possible, but the content on the card is encrypted so -as of now- you cannot make much use of it.

- Reading NFC tags will be the most important usecase, but some do allow writing to them as well.

- Google Nexus S allows itself to be exposed as tag too: there was no api way shown, but android apparently delivers a mini-app for that.

- The speaker told the rumor that Sandisk investigates ways to expose sd-cards as NFC tags.

- Currently the only larger public use case is the “touch” option of the Deutsche Bahn, which enables you to get train tickets via NFC enabled devices.

During the presentation I thought of use cases of NFC: I see the mot potential in areas where read/write-able tags are required (to hold some kind of state information at a ertain location): read-only tags will imo not get so much traction, as putting up a QR code is (compared to that) a much cheaper deployment option. (…as of now with a much bigger device basis, as nearly every device can now recognize barcodes)

The project the speakers talked about was the NFC-Puzzle ( source at http://dev.c-base.org/nfc-puzzle ).

@tomayac: more you want to know? (try to get speakers twitter handle for giving it to you)