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At Alcatel-Lucent's research and testing centre in Antwerp, engineers have converted office space into model apartments to create a more realistic environment for testing the next generation of home technologies.
If the future plays out as these Belgium researchers are planning, a wireless home network will dominate our domestic existence. The mobile phone will act as a kind of uber-remote for this network, controlling and linking together the home's various computing, entertainment and telecommunications systems.
While the future technology on show in these mocked-up apartments was fascinating, even more intriguing was a short demonstration down the hallway for a product called Tikitag, which is commercially available now. It was released for sale on October 1, the day Connect visited the testing centre.
Despite its Maori sounding name, Tikitag has no connection to New Zealand. That said, it would not be surprising if, once the brand's existence becomes more widely known down here, a lawyer's letter from iwi interests asserting an interest in the name finds its way to Alcatel-Lucent corporate headquarters in Paris.
Tikitag is an attempt to bring radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging technology to the consumer market. RFID technology has been used in businesses for decades and is an increasingly important tool for tracking and recording product movements through a growing number of organisations' supply chains.
Products labelled with RFID chip tags can be identified by an RFID reader as the labels come within range of that reader, eliminating the need for barcode scanning. The time-saving and accuracy benefits of RFID have seen major retailers, including the US's Wal-Mart, mandate all suppliers ship products in RFID-labelled bundles.
In New Zealand, kiwifruit processor EastPack is a significant user of RFID technology, employing it to help track and monitor the millions of trays of produce it exports each year.
The meat-processing industry is also a major user of the technology.
Tikitag uses a variant of RFID technology called near field communication (NFC) which requires the tag chip in this case embedded in a sticker to touch a reader connected to a computer or a NFC-capable cellphone.
Tikitag's website describes the technology as a service that enables anyone to link real world objects with the online world and make applications accessible with a single touch.
In other words when a computer or cellphone detects a tag it will perform a task, such as opening a certain web page, based on the instructions previously assigned to that specific tag.
Through the Tikitag website tag buyers can program individual tags to perform the desired function before sending them on to recipients.
Suggestions for how the technology might be used include sticking tags to business cards so that when the recipient swipes the card it opens the sender's profile page on a social networking site or calls the sender's phone number via Skype.
The question is: does this type of NFC technology have any practical value?
While industrial RFID systems enable high-speed processing of masses of data in real-time, swiping a sticker over a home PC is, in most cases, more effort that typing in a web address or phone number.
As UK technology news website The Register notes: "The big problem for NFC is that it lacks a killer application, a reason for existing."
Alcatel-Lucent Ventures, the incubation arm of the technology giant responsible for developing Tikitag, is gambling that users will find the elusive killer application themselves. Through its website it is encouraging the development and sharing of applications that use NFC.
Putting NFC tags, and readers, into the hands of hackers and hobbyists is probably a sensible way to try and find the elusive killer application - that is, if such an application exists, says The Register.
There are two other main barriers to the success of the Tikitag concept: the cost of tags and the low availability of readers.
A starter pack of a reader and 10 tags costs ¬34.95 (about $76) while packs of 25 tags without the reader cost ¬19.95 (about $43). At those prices it will take an impressive application to encourage widespread uptake of the readers. Tikitag's partial answer is that NFC-reader functionality is increasingly being built into cellphones, meaning tag swiping could be done via users' mobiles, eliminating the need to buy a PC-attached reader.
In summary, this is a cool technology, but with uncertain potential. However if anyone has developed that killer application, Connect would be delighted to experience it. Post a tag to PO Box 1014, Napier. Our Tikitag reader is plugged in and standing by.
* Simon Hendery travelled to Belgium as a guest of Alcatel-Lucent.
