The NFC Forum, a non-profit association created to advance the use of NFC technology, has selected 20 finalists from 52 entrants in its Global Competition 2009 awards. Entries represented 21 countries and four continents. More than half of the 20 finalists are from two countries, Finland, with seven, and Germany, with four.
Developers in a Commercial Track compete for “The Best NFC Service of the Year” while a Research Track recognizes “The Most Innovative NFC Research Project of the Year.” The winner in each track will be awarded U.S. $6,700; second place, U.S. $2,028 and third place, U.S. $1,353.
The 10 commercial track finalists are:
- Collis B. V., (Netherlands): ING NFC Mobile Payment Product
- HORATIO GmbH and Audiantes GmbH (Germany): NFC Mobile Live Help
- Interactive Research & Development (Pakistan): Interactive Alerts for Childhood Pneumonia
- NEXPERTS GmbH (Austria): NFC-based Gift Voucher System
- Nordea (Finland): NFC-based Strong End-user Authentication Solution for Online Banking
- Precise Biometrics (Sweden): BioXpress
- Reslink Solutions, Ltd. (Finland): Reslink mobile NFC Client Builder, “The NFC Enabler”
- Rhein-Main-Verkehrsverbund GmbH (Germany): RMVmobil - The NFC-based Customized Mobile Portal
- Sabre Technologies (Pvt) Ltd. (Sri Lanka): Customer Intimacy with NFC
- servtag GmbH (Germany): friendticker. com - NFC Location-Based Mobile Social Ticker
The 10 research finalists are:
- ETH Zürich (Switzerland): APriori: An NFC-Based Product Rating System
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA): Eclectyk
- Technische Universität München (Germany): NFaCebook, NFC-based Facebook Profile Matching in the Hybrid Space
- Université Joseph Fourier Grenoble (France): EasyRide, An Ecological, Ethical and Social Ride-Sharing NFC-Enabled System
- Univerza v Ljubljani, Faculty of Electrical Engineering (Slovenia): Touch to Communicate
- University of Oulu (Finland): Touch & Learn: NFC-based Application for Language Learning
- University of Oulu (Finland): Touch & Collect: Collecting Multimedia Content from Museums
- University of Oulu (Finland): Touch & Contro: Controlling Public Displays by Touching RFID tags
- VTT Technical Research Centre (Finland): Hot in the City
- VTT Technical Research Centre (Finland): UBITEMS - Ubiquitous Temperature Measurements with NFC Compatible Batteryless Sensor Tags
Commercial entries are evaluated on market viability and how successfully and innovatively they meet the identified need using NFC technology. Research entries are judged on quality of design and their creative and innovative use of NFC technology.
Each team of finalists is invited to deliver a presentation and live demonstration in a demo space at the WIMA NFC Developers Summit April 23. The jury, composed of senior and recognized professionals and experts from academia and sponsoring companies, will vote to select the first-, second- and third-place winners for each track. Winners will be announced at an awards ceremony that evening at WIMA.
NFC Forum members Nokia and WIMA are Platinum sponsors of the competition. Silver sponsors are NFC Forum members INSIDE Contactless and Stollmann E+V GmbH. ![[end]](/resources/bullet/nfcnews-4.gif)
