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Let’s say you are in a museum of modern art in a crowded day, and you can’t to spend enough time near each of the latest gadgets in technology to read descriptions and look at the pictures… To help you with this little problem, Alcatel-Lucent produced the tikitag with Near Field Communication technology. Using a special reader device with display you could get it close to the tags placed on each gadget in the museum and receive all the details on your handset, complete with pictures. This way you could get away from the exposed products and learn about each of them while drinking a tasty coffee in a near café bar.
These tikitags work similar with those clipped on items in a clothes store, to protect them from stealing. If a thief tries to steal one, as soon as it passes by the RFID detectors on the way out, the alarm sound starts to beep.

But what if you could use this cool technology in other ways too? There is a large number of possibilities, but in order to make you understand how it works, let me tell you a few things about NFC and RFID.
The Near Field Communication is a short-range wireless transmission technology that sends and receives information to and from enabled devices in maximum 4 inches distance range. One example of such device is BenQ T80 NFC enabled smartphone that allows the user to perform fast transactions. The Zeki kids’ phone with NFC technology can communicate with other compatible devices in the near proximity, similar with Bluetooth.

NFC technology in Nokia phones is like a built-in credit card, so that, when you keep your cell phone close to the reader in the store, it detects the chip automatically and performs the transaction with your card.
The cell phone lets you buy tickets in the same manner, or even visit websites, call friends or send messages, by just tapping the tags. In addition, you can access online sites in order to find weather information, news and other things.

NFC uses the automatic Radio Frequency Identification technology in charge with storing short information on tags placed on objects. When get your handset integrating the reader close to it, you receive the details instantly. RFID works with radio waves and has integrated circuits for storing and processing, while the antenna transmits and receives the signals to and from your reader. It is a cheap tracking method used worldwide for different purposes.
On October 1, Alcatel-Lucent released tikitag for connecting offline word objects with online applications and content.

How does tikitag work:
You can link tikitags to web pages like blogs, your company’s presentation website or social networking profile pages, and to do this, you need to login to the tikitag website, start a new application, select the URL you want to link the tikitag to, and then put an empty tag to the tikitag reader. The device will read the unique number on the tag, while your online account will ask if you want to use that specific tag for linking to your website. You can select it and confirm the link.



As I said earlier, you can do a lot of things with these tags, like, for example, linking them to specific applications. When the person who received, let’s say, a promotional object from your company, will arrive in front of his/her PC and put the tag on the reader, it will launch the application you designed for that specific tag. It can be a presentation application, a slideshow photo album, video, business card, or anything you want.

The company provides a starter package containing an USB RFID reader working at 13.56MHz frequency with 4cm reading distance, and 10 RFID adhesive tags, all with a 2-year warranty. What you need to have is at least Windows XP, Vista or MacOSX 10.4 operating system pre-installed on your computer.
After purchasing the kit for $49.95 you’ll have to install the client software on your computer following the instructions. Next you’ll plug the tikitag USB reader into an USB port and you’re done.
Tikitag stickers can be placed on anything you want and read at a later time via the tikitag Application Correlation Server manager.

In the following video you cane see exactly how easy it is to use:

Tikitag Overview Video: