The Nokia Ventures Organization
generates new business ideas that fall
outside the scope of Nokia’s core business
units. The organization recently
proposed using mobile phones as an
RFID tag reader. This functionality
could give consumers new interaction
modalities and service discovery methods
by capitalizing on the promise of
RFID tag technology.3 The broad market
penetration of mobile phones in the
Nordic countries has achieved the first
truly pervasive computing platform, so
it’s only natural to add pervasive consumer
services and capabilities to it. In
addition, mobile phone capabilities have
developed rapidly, making them good
candidates for the universal remote controllers
and sensors that RFID enables.
Nokia began the tag reader design
early in 2003 with a search for the product
concept. The first ideas focused on a
separate device for reading data from and
writing data to the RFID tags. The concept
further evolved to integrate the
reader into the mobile phone. Other concepts
included the kinds of services that
the device could offer consumers.
Nokia used the Cybelius Maestro tool
to build the virtual prototypes. It was
already using Maestro for building simulations
on Nokia’s Series 60 mobile
phone platform. For the RFID tag
reader product, the Cybelius Maestro
tool allowed Nokia to study usable
product concepts given the RFID tech