Touch me, I'm electric [Comms Contactless]

For several years in the Finnish city of Oulu, if you could touch it, you could tag it. Tagging technology turned up in schools, parking meters and shopping catalogues. Elderly residents could touch a mobile phone to a menu card to order their meals-on-wheels service for the day, instead of phoning in. The city's department of education let workers use their mobile phones as office keys. And children at Hintta primary school didn't have to shout out when it came to taking the register each morning, instead checking in by touching their name badges to the teacher's mobile. The enabling technology was the near-field communication (NFC) protocol.