Academia, Featured, My Research »

Using some material from my PhD thesis, we wrote two papers about the assessment of Near Field Communication (NFC) by Swiss experts. The first paper was presented at the International Conference on Mobile Business (ICMB 2007) in Toronto (Download: PDF).

The second paper is an improved version, which was accepted for publication in the journal: Information Systems and E-Business Management (Springer)

Title:
Near Field Communication: an assessment for future payment systems
Abstract:
In this paper, we present an assessment of Near Field Communication (NFC) in the context of a payment market. During these past years, we have been witnessing a number of mobile payment trials based on NFC. Early experiences are already quite encouraging and many expect NFC to become a highly efcient and effective technology for mobile payments. The ob jective of our research is to evaluate in a systematic manner the potential of NFC as an upcoming technology for mobile payments. In order to ensure the rigor of our research, we used a formal and structured approach based on multi-actor multi-criteria methods. Our research provides one of the first assessment of NFC and a realistic picture of the current Swiss situation as we involved numerous mobile payment experts. Our findings show that Swiss industry experts are quite enthusiastic about the future of NFC.
Download: Draft PDF, Springer PDF

Featured, Tools »

Lately, I faced a problem that probably a lot of academics who use several computers have.

How to synchronize all my working files between my computers?

I have a MacBook Pro at work and an iMac at home. To share my files between the two computers, I used my iDisk of the Apple MobileMe service (formerly known as .Mac). This solution worked ok, even though I had several problems with the synchronization between the local and remote iDisk.

As I recently got a Tablet PC (HP Compaq 2710p) running Windows XP, I wanted to find a good way to sync three machines. I could continue to use my iDisk. However, it wasn’t convenient to mount the iDisk drive on Windows XP.

After some browsing on the very good Lifehacker website, I found and tested a service called SugarSync. I was amazed by its simplicity and reliability. Since they offer a 45-days trial, I started to use the service. It gave me entire satisfaction for my needs (sync, backup, web and iphone access). I decided to pay the little amount of $24.99/per year (for 10GB of storage). Usually, I try to use free online service. However, I did not find any tools with the same quality as SugarSync at that point of time.

Furthermore, both famous technology columnists David Pogue (New York Times) and Walter Mossberg (Wall Street Journal) reviewed SugarSync and also found it to be a great synchronization service.

Here below is the video of the review of Mossberg. It will give you more details of about SugarSync if you want to use it.