NFC vs Acoustics, Mobile Payments and HopOn

NFC (Near Field Communication) is an industry standard for communication between mobile devices as well as between mobile device and peripheral hardware, for tasks as mobile payments or controlling mobile functionality by area, or by proximity to some other device (see Samsung TecTile sticker for a cool use case by Samsung).
Note that NFC and Bluetooth are not the same technology (see the difference between the two here).

While it seems as a promising standard, adopted by most new mobile devices, iPhone still doesn't. Which makes it a bit difficult if you want to implement a generic application with communication between devices, or between device and hardware, and the device might be iPhone. Applications in that domain might be games (e.g. a bingo game that invites all devices in the room to participate, without a need to "register" or "know" the arranging server domain), broadcast communication in a closed environment (bus, train, airplane) and of course mobile payment.

As an alternative to NFC, some companies have proposed the interesting idea of using un-hearable, ultrasound, sound waves communication, companies like Brazilian startup NearBytes, Microsoft and others more. Idea is to use modern mobile device abilities to receive and to play inaudible signal (>18kHz), supported for example by iOS and Android.
(Read more about NearBytes here).

I came to this recently while following Israeli startup HopOn, presenting a working system for transportation mobile payment based on acoustic signal broadcasted by a small hardware device on the bus. Their technology seems promising and is already working in some bus lines in Tel-Aviv. See their marketing piece here, it's in Hebrew but you don't really need to understand Hebrew to follow it.

A practical UI note on the order of input elements in a form

Input elements in a form are usually arranged in their natural ordered, that is: an item that seems to come naturally first would come before another one which seems more naturally to be second. This is of course subjective, but most people would agree that First Name should come first.

Recently I got a feedback on a form, sent by a heavy-user using the specific form many times a day. His request was simple, yet I've never thought about that before. He was asking if we could be kind and helpful to reorder some of the input input elements in the form, so items that require the keyboard would be in one group while items that need only the mouse, such as check boxes and radio buttons, would be separately grouped on their own. This would allow him easier and quicker fill of the form, he said.

(One can argue that the easiest and quickest way to fill a form is by using only the keyboard. But it appears that this user, as probably many others, is good with the TAB key to move between elements, but he is not aware or not keen of using the arrow keys for navigating between radio buttons and space bar for checking or unchecking a check box).

In order not to break the natural order of things (keeping first name first, and gender male/female reasonably up in the form) the grouping should be done in areas of the form, which comes to my new practical note to be phrased as:

Try to avoid too many switches of keyboard input elements to mouse input elements, if those can be naturally ordered into reasonable sub-groups to avoid the switch. This would allow a more rapid fill of the form.

Frenemies and All@1MC - I'm proud of you!

Two groups I was guiding in Software Product workshop at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo won places #1 ("Frenemies") and #4 (All@1MC) out of 70 projects (all in very high level).

Frenemies, created by Oron Perahia, Chen Saranga, Anat Oren and Shachar Witkovsky, is a fully fledged Laser Tag system, including all the goodies a company that wants to run a Laser Tag arena would need, from the web site for registering to a game (buying a game) to the management of the site and the fighting scene itself, hardware and software.
Won #1.

All@1MC, created by Yael Hof, is a Client-Agent Media Center application for your Android mobile phone to serve as a very smart remote control for the PC which serves as your media center. The application allows your mobile to view the list of movies and pictures you have on your PC, start playing them on your TV via selection on your mobile, sending instructions to the media center PC via the home WiFi network, with an agent running on the media center PC. You can also get more details on the mobile before or while watching the movie, download content from the web (again, the mobile serves as a smart remote control, all operations are done on the mobile device, the actual download is happening on the media center PC) and watching a slideshow of your pictures on the TV, controlling the slideshow from the mobile.
Won #4.