Billboard Magazine great use of NFC

Have you tried to share photos with a friend using NFC yet? Finding the whole process kind of mysterious? You're not alone, but a new initiative by Billboard Magazine in Brazil may help to take the voodoo out of near-field communications. The latest edition of the magazine includes NFC chips embedded into magazine pages containing links to the music described in the magazine's articles. While reading about the new Queens of the Stone Age album, for example, you can tap your NFC-enabled phone to the page to hear one of the tracks playing through your phone's speakers. Based on what you can see in a YouTube clip promoting the chipped-up pages, it looks like a very simple implementation. When your phone makes the connection, the NFC chip opens the phone's web browser, directs it to the Billboard website and auto-plays a track.

Keeping up with the Jetsons

The most exciting aspect of this is what innovation like this could mean for magazines in general. Printed media is currently losing the war against digital media, mostly because it is a static medium which takes time to create and distribute. Invariably, printed news is yesterday's news. NFC could be one way to bring this content to life. Chips in stories could link to updated articles with the latest information, photographs could be viewed as videos on mobile devices, and authors could engage with readers by utilising interactive content. Of course, the same could be done if the content was just published on a website, but the fusion between physical and digital media has the potential to create unique consumption opportunities that you can't achieve with just one or the other.