The first-place winner in the Research Track was VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, for “Hot in the City,” a mobile social media service involving Facebook that uses NFC-enabled mobile phones as a friend connection platform. The second-place winner in the Commercial Track was Servtag of Germany, for “Friendticker.com,” an NFC-based mobile social ticker that allows users to share their actual locations with friends by touching Friendticker NFC stickers in restaurants and bars.

Interactive Research & Development of Pakistan took first-place in the Commercial Track for “Interactive Alerts for Childhood Pneumonia,” a real-time patient tracking and referral system for use in low-resource settings. The system is currently being used for a pneumonia surveillance study in young children in Karachi, Pakistan.

Third place in the Commercial Track went to Nordea of Finland for its NFC-based end-user authentication solution for online banking, which enables secure access to an online banking site via an NFC-enabled handset and a dual-interface bank card.

Second place winner in the Research Track was the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), Faculty of Electrical Engineering, for “Touch to Communicate” that allows a consumer who has difficulty communicating to manage phone calls with a simple touch between a mobile device and passive electronic tags. The third-place prize went to ETH Zurich of Switzerland for the APriori NFC-based mobile application that supports consumer purchasing decisions by interacting with tagged products to deliver point-of-sale product ratings.

Winners in each track were awarded cash prizes. First-place winners received U.S. $6,622, second-place, $1,986 and third-place $1,324.

Nokia and WIMA are Platinum sponsors of the competition. Silver sponsors are INSIDE Contactless and Stollmann E+V GmbH while equipment sponsors are Over-C and ViVOtech.