“The main rule is to please and touch.

All others are made only to achieve this first one”.

MOLIERE

Even if the NFC standard is young (developed in 2004), I have been asked to write this book for several years now, due to the pioneering role played in France (and in Europe) by our Computer Science Master’s degree MBDS (www.mbds-fr.org) at the University of Nice – Sophia-Antipolis around the prototyping of innovative services using this standard. MBDS prototyped NFC services in all sectors of economic life: from tourism and culture in Nice, to social payment in India, via campuses in Haiti, museums, airports, hotels, connected houses in Morocco and electric cars in Sophia Antipolis. In 2009, the city of Nice was the first for the deployment of NFC standard in Europe, because of the MBDS innovation research lab.

After half a dozen books published on databases, I was not really eager to write a new book. My first collection of books, following Knuth’s book (The Art of Computer Programming), my bedside reading as a fellowship student in California, was entitled “The Art of Databases”.

What changed my mind was the enthusiasm of Anne-Marie Lesas, who was working on her PhD on NFC secure services with our industrial partner Gemalto under a CIFRE convention¹ from the ANRT² and of an IFCPAR contract³ (www.cefipra.org) on NFC virtual social currency in India with TATA Consultancy Services (CS) and Bangalore University, as well as a scientific expertise on NFC patent infringement in the United States in 2015. As a brilliant former MBDS student after a professional career, Anne-Marie first showed passion for mobiquitous new technologies (NFC cars, and means of detecting earthquakes by using smartphone sensors). What a delight for a professor, who is nothing but a dream purveyor, to see a student take over.

The title of this book implies the duality of “Art” and “Science”, which are the two approaches to perception and understanding of the world; in prefaces to database books, I would write: “the word art refers to a way of investigation, recreation and interpretation of the real world in opposition to the science which bears an abstract interpretation, based on formal concepts, models and tools”. Creativity on NFC applications is unlimited with mobiquitous usages that reinvent the real world by creating new bridges toward the virtual world; these applications are based on strict standardized concepts that we explain, along with their implementation methods. Dealing with this duality is the double purpose of this book.

In this way, this book is the result of a pedagogical encounter between a professor and a researcher in order to allow other IT developers to contribute to changing the world by touching it! I would thus like to thank Anne-Marie for her professional and human skills and, through her, all students who, by their enthusiasm, lead me toward a process of never-ending, spiral innovation. Creativity on content and services is a beautiful spiralist adventure that brings life (special thanks to Franketienne for this beautiful concept of spiralism, which we shared and discussed in Port au Prince).

I would like to invite readers to dream about their life, to have big dreams while keeping in mind that new technologies must first and foremost serve the good of humankind and the improvement of shared environments, and of the lives of each of us. “Always put man at the center” and do not hesitate to be “a nonconformist, even an innovation anarchist” as shown by Pierre Laffite, the founder of Sophia-Antipolis Science park.

I also have a thought for my friend and colleague, pioneer of all types of databases (and Big Data), Mike Stonebraker, godfather of one of the first MBDS classes and winner of the Turing Award in 2014, who would always stress applied research in information systems, with the obsession of always trying to solve concrete problems and not to only stick to simple theoretical intellectual constructions disconnected from reality.

This book has a double purpose, which corresponds to its two main parts; it aims both toward:

• – an exhaustive, theoretical approach of the NFC standard, unavoidable in the future of smartphones, as much in the informational as in the transactional world;
• – a pragmatic and systematic approach of the development of NFC applications, based on numerous prototypes of innovative services created within our MBDS Master’s program since the birth of the standard in 2004.

This book is for IT engineers (IT generalists as much as students in Bachelor’s or Master’s programs) who are passionate about new technologies and curious about the use of NFC, particularly in mobile applications; our goal is to explain the technical and functional specificities of the NFC standard through notions essential to the understanding of the ecosystem, its mobile implementation (with Android) and its main applications.

With this book, we hope to give the reader autonomy in order for him to design and develop his own NFC applications. Innovation is invention meeting usage: innovate with this invention by imagining new practices.

To conclude this foreword, I will borrow two quotes I often use to end my conferences:

• – “Never forget that an ant can carry an elephant”, from my friend Sister Flora, who has been managing an orphanage in the South of Haiti, in Ile-à-Vaches for more than 30 years, with admirable love and creativity. Today, someone with a smartphone in his hands has more computer power than the computer used for the Apollo mission, and an access to information greater than President Kennedy ever had. A smartphone is a “world object”, as Michel Serres understood this word, and we must not forget that “even the thought of an ant can touch the sky” (Japanese proverb);
• – “If you cannot change the world, try to change YOUR world” (Karl Marx’s last phrase), which is the basis of a life of communaction in future tense and a reality which is not only mobiquitous.

Enjoy this book and enjoy NFC programming, I wish for you to become a communactor ant, open to the world to change it.