July 26, 2008 – As Sirit makes news with successful financials and acquisitions, Director of RFID Bill Allen talks how overlapping RFID with NFC ties together contactless payment and marketing technology.


We hear that Sirit is working with NFC technology in addition to RFID. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

ALLEN: Sure. NFC is an emerging technology that has been around for a few years and has been pushed by many of the credit card companies and telephone handset manufacturers, to provide conveniences to the consumers, such as the ability to pay for items with their cell phones, making the cell phone actually become your credit card.

It also enables the cell phone to obtain information. The vision is to have marked posters, “smart signs,” with a tag the cell phone can read to get information on a product or a movie or something of that nature.

How does the Sirit NFC offering work?

ALLEN: We actually developed a tag that is contained within the cell phone. There is an NFC chip and we write the software layer that talks from the chip to the cell phone, itself.

What else can cell phones communicate with that might personalize information for the receiver?

ALLEN: Along with smart billboard and smart signs, the other capability is providing consumers with instant savings, instant rebates, instant coupons shopping in a grocery store.

Using your NFC unit phone, you can actually obtain information on that product and do comparison shopping immediately. So, there are all kinds of capabilities that NFC can bring for the consumer that are a great benefit.

How would the coupon-type activity work if you were in a retail store? What would actually happen?

ALLEN: A lot of stuff has not been defined yet from the retailer perspective, but the vision is to be able to enable consumers to make more intelligent shopping decisions. The benefit would also be to provide some immediate savings as the consumer is shopping throughout the retail stores.

How do the buyers, i.e. people who either do billboards or create phones or have retail stores to offer discounts, react when they hear about this?

ALLEN: Well, it is an interesting concept to them. Right now, there has been little adoption here in the U.S.; but there have been some pilot programs that have been pretty successful.

Japan and other parts of Asia are already using NFC enabled cell phones. We work with cell phone manufacturers that are already using NFC over in Asia. We have also been working with Microsoft to help enable NFC functionality within Microsoft.

Would it be correct to say that there are applications of NFC that you could use as an embedded technology in products other than cell phones?

ALLEN: Sure, embedded into store displays, again, if we go back to smart billboards and smart signs.

Embedded RFID technology, I think, is still a very young and emerging market, and we envision embedded RFID to have more and more applications. That is an important segment for us, since we manufacture modules that actually get embedded into hand held computing devices; printers that are enabled with RFID; and we remanufacture a number of products for the embedded RFID marketplace.