Tyfone putting NFC in MicroSD Cards

Wow, this sounds like a great idea, Tyfone has developed a system and are now putting NFC chips, controllers, and antenna’s into Micro SD and SD cards. This makes it possible for mobile phones and other PDA like devices to easily add NFC capabilities to their device just by simply changing the SD card they are using. Sounds like a great plan, don’t have a Nexus S, just get a Tyfone MicroSD Card.


According to them the first field trials of Tyfone’s u4ia Secure Memory Card (SMC) technology are now expected to take place during the first half of this year, following successful internal testing at 21 organizations around the world. Tyfone’s u4ia (pronounced ‘euphoria’) has some serious potential to be very popular, especially with how NFC has been taking off lately, not to mention Google jumping into NFC head first as principle member.

Tyfone’s u4ia Secure Memory Card would be able to break free the handset availability problem and allow any device with a SD slot to have NFC. This goes for most cell phones these days, as well as camera’s and GPS systems and more. For more information on what Tyfone’s cards contain see below:

* An industry standard, GlobalPlatform-compliant multi-application contactless smart card chip
* A memory card controller that includes Tyfone IP that enables the SMC to work with any SD slot equipped device
* A miniaturized antenna, developed by Tyfone
* Flash memory, available in standard SD and microSD card capacities (Tyfone’s NFC additions don’t reduce the size of memory available)

Even though we welcome as many phone manufactures as possible to integrate NFC into mobile handsets because of the possibilities it holds, Tyfone’s solution looks to be a very good one. We will report back with more on this as we hear it.

• [via NFC World]

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Fly or Die: The Nintendo 3DS, Rockmelt, And Mobile Wallets

Is the new Nintendo 3DS all that? Does Rockmelt have a chance? Will mobile wallets ever be adopted by real people in real stores? CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I tackle these questions in this week’s edition of Fly or Die. Watch the video to find out who our surprise guest is this time after we give our verdicts on his company’s product.

The Nintendo 3DS uses simple stereoscopic 3D graphics that really pop out and combined with a gyroscope effect creates an incredibly immersive experience. You might look like an idiot playing it because you move your whole body around unnecessarily, but it is very addictive. Biggs wrote up his initial impressions here.

Remember Rockmelt, the Chromium-based browser startup backed by Marc Andreessen? When it launched in private invite-only beta last November, the press it received was deafening. But by the time it opened up publicly about a week ago with only a few hundred thousand active users, fewer people noticed. Meanwhile, the team has been working away and the social browser is pretty solid. Biggs and I argue whether it can make a comeback.

And finally, there’s all the recent hubbub about mobile wallets and how NFC chips in phones will make them a reality. Some Android phones already have NFC chips. Some people think the iPhone 5 will come with an NFC chip and some people don’t. But they should find their way into an iPhone at some point in the future. Does that make NFC-powered mobile wallets the next great feature? I don’t think so and have laid out my thinking on this topic elsewhere. Biggs is ready to toss his fat wallet for wave-and-pay freedom.

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Gorilla Glass “A Day Made of Glass”

Behold what our pals at Corning have whipped up, a lovely video showing a world where glass is our main working material, showing us everything from the sun to our statistics – but wait, isn’t that what it is already today? Sort of! This is the sort of video that reminds us that the movie Minority Report only came out a few years ago and already things like NFC are making its future-looking world very much a reality. This video also includes items inside the handset world, so Androids rejoice!

Lots of touchscreen stuff as well, from touching the TV and adjusting it in the morning to speaking to friends via your bathroom mirror. Then there’s a tabletop TV whilst creating what appears to be a very colorful lunch, working with tabletop stoves via touchscreen blippers, Then there’s some refrigerator-front glass that the child of the parents we’ve been following in this video interact with once they get home from school – enlarging and moving photos in a very similar manner to that which we’ve been seeing on larger touchscreen devices for some time now – and the photos are moving too (maybe they’re movies!) thusly reminding us very much of a Harry Potter existence, one we would not mind.
Then comes the handsets. See-through phones that can instantly transfer picture display to the tabletop display. Kind of like the Atrix 4G? Yessir. The car of course is also touchschreen all the way, showing the woman a map and allowing her to add a sticky note to her dash. Above her is an auto-darkening piece of glass, and above the car as she drives is large format glass working instantly to show traffic delays and such (this is already a reality with lights that can display similar warnings, but this is so much COOLER.) Then upon passing a bud stop, you can see that this too is of course a touchscreen display, helping pedestrians find their way around to different busses and transport, collecting direction on their again transparent display handsets. Then you see inside an office with another gigantic display for meetings, again with the tabletop display, all of this for sweet fashion work.
Instant transportation to walls in malls, gigantic planes of glass for the greatest interaction and instant movement between the office and the store with ads just created. Then there’s flexible display glass that can be rolled up and display onto. Amazing! Then of COURSE there’s perfectly amazing 3D display glass, transportable paper-sized glass (like a transparent tablet) for night reading of a book, and there you have it! A day of glass! We’re very excited, Corning, let’s make this reality a reality!

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