Companies working on NFC tour guide program
01 October, 2009
category: NFC
CONNECTHINGS, INSIDE Contactless and SAGEM Wireless announced they have formed a consortium to develop the Smart Muse Mobile NFC Tour guide and deploy two pilot demonstrations in the old center of the City of Nice and at the Teen Gallery at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Smart Muse will enable visitors to easily access location- and time-specific multimedia information on NFC-enabled mobile phones by simply “waving” the device over NFC tags.
The team has been awarded a grant for this project from France’s Ministry of Economy, Industry and Employment, one of 13 such initiatives selected by the Ministry to develop and deploy new services and applications based on NFC technology. The two Smart Muse demonstration projects will be the first deployments of the Wave-Me NFC Service Platform, and the consortium expects to have them ready in early 2010.
The multilingual content has been developed in conjunction with the City of Nice and Centre Pompidou to be both informative and anecdotal in nature, as well as tailored to the individual’s demographics. It has been designed to provide users with a more intimate sense of place, and will be written to encourage participation through postings of comments and stories about their visit. Smart Muse will also provide information on nearby tourist services – shops, restaurants, hotels, city services, events, and others – and the content will be updated constantly.
The consortium members will each apply their expertise in developing the Smart Muse project. INSIDE will provide its NFC technology, NFC hardware and software for the handset, NFC tags and other patented technology. CONNECTHINGS brings knowledge from its AdTag server-side contextualized content management, as well as its experience with NFC tag and mobile application life cycle management and other technologies. SAGEM Wireless is providing the NFC-enabled mobile phones that will be used in conjunction with the Centre Pompidou demonstration project, and which will be provided to visitors at no cost for use while inside the museum.
The consortium received the grant based on the originality of the Smart Muse project, openness of the application and compliance with existing standards, quality of the partnership, viability of the project, project management and anticipated economic benefits. The grant covers approximately 30% of the development and deployment of a total project cost of more than $2.1 million and the remainder will be self-funded by the consortium partners.