Apple patents workflow sharing using NFC, because it’s never too late

Two things which are bound to mess along with your brain: playing the oboe and reading dense Apple patent applications. You do find the occasional gem , but often you’ll read scores of pages only to find that the so-called invention has already been put to exploit by others. On this instance, Apple has successfully patented the premise of using NFC to ascertain a master/slave relationship between two smartphones, as a prelude to creating a completely-fledged WiFi connection that enables the sharing of contact details or more complicated sequences of actions. Now, it is a smart idea, especially because the patent specifically talks about retail applications (shown above), but is the result so wildly different to Android Beam or perhaps Bump ? Even Fujitsu came up with an identical concept for using NFC to trigger location-relevant workflows . Either there’s some significant overlap here, or we’ve spent too long playing reed instruments.

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This post is tagged: contact details, master-slave, patent applications, reed instruments, retail applications, slave relationship