NFC Mobiquitous Information Service Prototyping at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis and Multi-mode NFC Application Proposal

In July 2010, more than 5 billions of Earth inhabitants (out of 6.8) had a cell phone (Ericsson Study) with more than 2 millions of new subscribers a day in 2010. We expect 3.3 billion of Smart phones in 2015, Google just announced mid November 2010 that their Nexus “S” smart phones will be NFC (Near Field Communication) by the end of 2010. This changes drastically the landscape of information service engineering. RFID tags and NFC standard in cell phones will be cornerstone of the ICT future in this new paradigm of “local wide web”: “Smart objects with smart phones on ...smart LOCAL places is a summary of our digital future; digital divide will not be on infrastructure but on SERVICES”. In this paper we give an overview of a portfolio of NFC innovative services prototyped at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis since the inception of the standard in 2004, infer some architectural and economics lessons, and propose a key research contribution based upon a genuine generic framework for multi-mode NFC applications within a SIM card.