Sharing or transferring data across different mobile phone devices can be done in a number ways. There has been an influx of many new technologies propelling this cause. The Stanford MobiSocial Research Group revealed that it is very eager about the prospect of including NFC in smartphones. Near-field communication or NFC enables two devices to connect with each other on simply bringing them closer.
This technology reads in data called ‘tags’, which is a set of records with well-defined formats. These records are mostly business cards, URLs, or other domain-specific data type. Many of the applications of this new technology include mobile payments, mobile commerce, ticketing in public transport, contact information exchange, quickly looking up product information, and more. It is also touted that NFC may soon become standard in the next generation of smartphones. This wireless communication technology supports different modes of operation. Any smartphone which acts as a reader can scan a tag to extract data from it. Additionally it also supports P2P transactions, permitting devices to share data.
Google and Samsung’s Nexus S, was the first instance of NFC appearing on the Android platform. But it was limited to just reading tags in the Gingerbread release, which proved to be unfeasible since not many devices support tags yet. After probing more, experts at the Stanford were able to run P2P mode between two devices. This implementation was dubbed as MyTag, which employs a true P2P connection to forward a tag between phones with a socket established between the MyTagServer and MyTagClient. The people at Mobisocial have also started using the Junction platform, which lets an application run across phones even if the other device does not yet have the application being used. It basically focuses on mobile platforms and is multi party. Junction applications also share information to identify the application being run and which session to join.
Junction and NFC works in tandem for launching applications over various mobile phones. NFC aides the process of starting the application while Junction enables the applications to run smoothly across devices. The success of NFC apps and Junction depends on how well the users reciprocate to it in the near future.