Tikitag Becomes Touchatag, Adds Business Apps

"Council members used to get giant binders before each meeting," Haisler states. "It took lots of preparation work and consumed a lot of paper." The information is accessible online, but the URL at which the data is stored is long and difficult to key in. What's more, not all council members are tech-savvy—some do not even maintain bookmarks on their browsers. So the city issued a touchatag reader to each council member, which they could connect to their home PC or Mac, and also offered each a touchatag whose ID number is associated with the URL at which the meeting material is stored. Being able to access the information online also enables council members to seek out specific terms or keywords in the documents, which are now viewed online rather than on paper. They, of course, can choose to print out all or part of the data at home if they so desire.

Another application Haisler envisions is to issue cards to residents and attach a touchatag to each card that would serve to identify its owner's utility account. Armed with a touchatag reader at home, or with an NFC phone, a resident could utilize the tag to call up his or her account online, in order to review or pay it. Or that individual could bring the card to a utility office, where a touchatag would be linked to a computer for his or her use.

Alcatel-Lucent hopes many more businesses or government agencies will find similar uses for the touchatags and/or QR codes. The firm has conceptualized a number of business applications at its Web site. Proposed uses include employing a reader station at a business conference to interrogate the touchatags embedded in conference badges, in order to exchange contact information with a business associate.

Programmers are encouraged to dream up new applications for touchatag, and can download an interface that will help them get started. Alcatel-Lucent also set up a Web site at which developers can share and promote their projects.

In an e-mail to RFID Journal, Coppens notes that although the touchatag reader could recognize a broad set of NFC RFID tags beyond the touchatag tag, "we have not opened the touchatag reader to read non-touchatag tags, as we want to guarantee the right quality of service to be delivered to users. In our touchatag tag, we have inserted advanced security codes to guarantee the uniqueness of the tag—e.g., in the near future, people will be able to certify non-touchatag tags to work with the touchatag service and applications. There are over two billion [ISO 14443] RFID cards out in the market which can potentially work with the touchatag service [such as fare cards for mass transit systems]."