- Tech companies won awards from NFC Forum this year based on a contest judged by the public.
- The forum sees a theme of building trust among the winning entries from Blu Oberon, Erisco, IoTize, NOUMI and ProQure.
The 2024 NFC Forum awarded five winners for apps and new NFC hardware that enable everything from accessing locked doors to connecting consumers with the retailers, the first year it featured open judging content.
The awards competition received 60 entries from industries including access control, transport, healthcare and retail. The five winners were Blu Oberon, Erisco, IoTize, NOUMI and ProQure.
As a technology that serves consumers and operates with smartphones, this year’s innovation wins tend to serve as ways to help build a sense of security and reliability for those using the technology with the NFC Forum Awards for 2024. Mike McCamon, NFC Forum’s executive director pointed to “trust” as a key trend among the latest innovation entries.
The Winners Are….
ProQure released an intelligent packaging solution featuring security features that safeguard against vulnerabilities like replay attacks and data sniffing. NOUMI won for its plug-and-play multi-purpose tap solution for digital receipts.
Erisco was awarded for its battery-less smart padlock, which uses energy harvesting to authenticate and unlock—offering both security and sustainability.
Blu Oberon’s Bluon Semiperdo SmartWristband is an NFC-band for children that instantly communicates a child’s location via smartphone. And IoTize won for its App Creator, a low-code platform to help developers create NFC-based apps.
Building Trust with Users
For solution providers “looking to bring innovative products to market, user trust is one of the largest obstacles to overcome,” McCamon said. “If there is any doubt about the security and reliability of a product, then it’ll have a much harder time gaining traction when it comes to user confidence.”
All five winners demonstrated how NFC technologies can improve people’s lives, he said, as each “recognized the value of interoperable open standards, and presented us with outstanding products, services and experiences that showcase the endless capabilities of NFC technology.”
Security Feature for Intelligent Packaging
ProQure sells its Composable Customer Experience Operating System (Composable CX OS). The company won an award for its NFC IC PQ201-S for intelligent packaging. The product passed qualification and was commercially released in the second quarter of 2024, with the first orders now in production.
The PQ201-S is designed to allow brands to create a direct engagement channel with consumers, explained the company’s CEO Ami Barda. It enables product authenticity verification, on-demand access to product information and personalized experiences, without an app.
Its Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) security feature, along with the company’s proprietary chip design and cloud-based authentication, provides low-cost, strong anti-counterfeiting capabilities, Barda said. “It mitigates risks such as replay attacks and data sniffing, adding a robust layer of security that authenticates each interaction between the tag and reader, enhancing brand protection and consumer trust,” he said.
Additionally, it supports standard NFC Data Exchange Format (NDEF) read operations, to make it both secure and compatible for seamless customer engagement, the company reported.
Looking ahead, the company plans to leverage the PQ201-S for large-scale product digitization. The company targets consumer authentication, transfer of ownership, digital product passport (DPP), and digital asset management. ProQure envisions this product powering broader digital customer experience (CX) initiatives to meet the demand for interconnected, data-rich consumer engagement solutions.
Single Tap Solution at Point of Sale
UK’s Noumi offers a way for consumers to access a digital receipt at a store’s point of sale as well as create a link for digital engagement, with a single tap. The system offers users privacy, without identifying themselves or giving retailers access to their email account.
At the center of the solution is a NOUMI plug-and-play device that is deployed at the point of sale and the printer. For the retailer, “there’s no integration required,” said Shakir Lincoln, Noumi’s founder.
Three years ago, the company launched around a simple premise: provide an app where users can collect digital receipts. They expanded the offering based on retailer requests to offer loyalty promotions and gamification which resulted in its multi-purpose tap, said Maria Demetriou, Noumi’s head of sales.
“The great thing is you’re saving paper, you’re saving trees and the customer will have that receipt for 12 months,” she said. Once the receipt is captured, the app also enables users to share receipts with others, for instance to receive refunds for company expenses.
The company’s multi-purpose tap was released this year to take the solution further. With this latest Noumi version, retailers could share loyalty schemes and other features, while collecting the demographics of the customer without identifying them. The app gives that retailer the ability to communicate to an anonymous customer without bombarding their e-mail with messages.
“It gives you a way of communicating when a customer comes in— how successful [a promotion is] and how frequently they come back,” said Demetriou. “Obviously we have to protect people’s privacy.”
The Noumi device can decode the language in a retailer’s POS system and then create the receipt without integrating with that sales software. To date, it is being adopted in the UK by convenience stores and restaurants, while the company is in discussion with several global retailers for deployments, Lincoln said.
Battery-free NFC padlock
Erisco engineered a battery-less, NFC-based smart padlock and app that allows a group of users to access a space or to accomplish lock-out, tag-out (LOTO) procedures with the tap of their phone.
The app enables users —such as employees of a company—to access a particular padlock within a specific area at a pre-approved time. What makes the technology unique is the ability to harvest energy from an NFC-enabled phone to identify the user, and then release or re-set a lock.
When a user wants to lock or open the padlock, they hold their phone to the lock for about five seconds while the lock’s capacitor is charged via NFC. The lock then authenticates their certificate and recognizes which group the user belongs to. The user can then open or close the lock. If the lock was configured to collect additional information, such as a work order number or asset number, the user will be prompted to provide or scan the information.
During the interaction, neither the lock nor the user’s phone are required to be online. Darryl Mitchell, Erisco’s CEO, added that “the use of NFC allows us to utilize good encryption to enhance security.”
Quick Power Harvesting
To enable power harvesting in a matter of seconds, Erisco’s engineers designed a patent-pending antenna coil. “This helps us keep our ‘tap time’ down to a reasonable five seconds, roughly twice as fast as the next best commercially available coil,” said Mitchell.
The first product was shipped in April this year. Initially deployed locks are specifically designed for LOTO use in heavy industry. Traditionally LOTO is a paper based system and therefore difficult to manage. “Our system helps managers understand how well their LOTO system is being complied with by collecting data in near real time on the LOTO interactions,” he explained.
Erisco is already selling its LOTO locks in volume and has started the process of making the security orientated, access control locks for high volume production, first in prototypes.
Public Voting for 2024 Awards
“What makes these winners even more deserving is that they won through an open public vote,” said McCamon. As a result, he pointed out that the winners were selected by their industry peers, demonstrating the significant value that each winner is projected to bring to the market.
“The biggest surprise is the continuing ingenuity of our members. NFC technology has been on the market for 20 years, and yet this year’s Innovation Awards proved that there are still endless possibilities and countless new use cases for NFC to improve our everyday lives,” he said.
“A key theme we noticed in this year’s award entries was that companies see the value of NFC tags used for multiple different functions and use cases,” McCamon said. The NFC Forum’s key initiatives continue to be: increased range, multi-purpose tap, modernizing device to device communication, expanding data exchange formats, and increased power for wireless charging.