It says something about the promise of Tikitag that its champions were able to convince telecom equipment behemoth Alcatel-Lucent to spin out the initiative into a separate venture. Aiming to create an Internet of things that have little to no intrinsic intelligence (and clearly oblivious that many a commenter has beaten it to the punch), Tikitag’s first product is a kit that includes an RFID reader and a number of tag stickers that can be encoded with, say, a URL. Move the tagged object to the encoded reader and the PC takes some action such as displaying a Web site that provides more information about the object.
NFC in general obviously has huge potential, but I’m less sure about the launch product. Perhaps it will become one of those products that geeks buy for less technical friends and relatives, joining the ranks of MSNTV, Presto and Ceiva. At the Showstoppers tech media event last night, Tikitag PR representative Ann Revell-Pechar said that she had put a tag on a picture of her daughter so that when her mother held it against the reader, she could call her granddaughter via Skype.
It would surely be helpful if the reader didn’t need to be tethered to the PC, but over time I’m sure that most phones will include RFID reading capabilities. In any case, Tikitag insists it’s trying to launch a platform here, and welcomes others to expand on the technology.
[…] Tikitag wasn’t the only batch of atoms to come out of the week that saw scores of startups launch at DEMOfall and the TechCrunch50. One I particularly liked was Fitbit, a clothespin-like device that includes an accelerometer and an OLED display that I hope you will be able to turn off. It essentially measures all your activity throughout the day (and night) and reports it. […]