NFC Forum Gains 14 New Members, Forum Activities Advance
June 29, 2006
Fourteen new organizations joined the Near Field Communication (NFC) Forum as members. Launched last year, the NFC Forum includes 80 member organizations. Earlier this month it unveiled its technology architecture which will serve as the foundation for interoperable NFC products and services.
Organizations that joined the forum include new associate-level members:
- Alps Electric Co. Ltd.
- ARM.
- Dai Nippon Printing Co. Ltd.
- E-Group (Hungary).
- KDDI Corp.
- MobileLime.
- Omnikey.
- Oberthur Card Systems.
- Sprint.
- SFR.
- Sirit Inc.
- Strategic Engineering Group (SEG).
- Telenor International.
- VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland joined the forum as a non-profit organization.
In addition to unveiling its technology architecture, the forum announced the first five forum specifications, as well as the initial tag formats for which support will be mandatory in NFC Forum-compliant devices. When complete, the NFC Forum's technology architecture will include specifications that define a modular NFC device architecture and protocols for interoperable data exchange and device-independent service delivery, device discovery and device capability.
The forum's initial specifications, available during the third quarter of this year, are:
- The NFC Data Exchange Format (NDEF) Specification specifies a common data format for NFC Forum-compliant devices and NFC Forum-compliant tags.
- The NFC Record Type Definition (RTD) Specification specifies standard record types used in messages between NFC Forum-compliant devices and between NFC Forum-compliant devices and tags.
The forum is also developing three initial Record Type Definition (RTD) Specifications, which detail technical requirements for specific types of records. They are:
- Smart Poster RTD Specification for posters incorporating embedded tags containing text, audio or other kinds of data that can be read by NFC-enabled devices.
- Text RTD Specification for records containing plain text that can be read by NFC-enabled devices.
- Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) RTD Specification for elements that refer to an Internet resource that can be read by NFC-enabled devices.
Source: Near Field Communication (NFC) Forum.