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Museum gets free NFC phone-tap exhibit cards from Nokia

Look, better than ordinary cards! In some way!

The Museum Of London has gone NFC, with tags beside the exhibits providing links to more information as Nokia continues trying to convince us that NFC is something we really want.

Nokia paid for the deployment, as it continues trying to remind us that NFC isn't just about mobile payments and can be used for all sorts of other stuff too: such as tapping a sticker beside an exhibit to get information displayed on a tiny smartphone screen, rather than a boring-old printed card that would be accessible to anyone:

To be fair the NFC tag could link to video or audio content which would be hard to display on a card, but the London deployment isn't going as far as a similar project at the Paris Pompidou Centre, which at least linked to Facebook so visitors could "Like" specific exhibits.

That deployment was paid for by the French government, while this one was funded entirely by Nokia – the museum confirmed to us that it hadn’t spent a penny on the 90 or so tags that Nokia has deployed around the sites.

Those tags will work with any NFC phone: GSM Arena reckons there are 21 currently available, though it misses the Samsung Tocco Quick Tap, so there are probably others missing too.

Nokia is pulling out all the stops to get us using NFC for things other than mobile payments, not least because it looks increasingly as though the proximity payment business will end up in the hands of the existing players: Visa, Mastercard, et al, leaving little incentive for brands like Nokia to get involved.

There's also the matter that Nokia's C7 can't actually handle payments, as it lacks the secure element (or SWP support) necessary to support them, so the company is keen to promote alternative uses for the technology as actively as it can. ®

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