INSIDE teams with CONNECTHINGS and SAGEM to power Smart Muse Mobile NFC project

AIX-EN-PROVENCE & PARIS, FRANCE: CONNECTHINGS, INSIDE Contactless and SAGEM Wireless announced that the Smart Muse Mobile NFC Tour guide pilot project made its debut at the Teen Gallery at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

In this project, Smart Muse enables young visitors to easily access and share location- and time-specific multimedia information on NFC Wave-Me(tm)-enabled mobile phones by simply "waving" the device over NFC tags.

"The Centre Pompidou's teen gallery is an ideal place to test a solution like Smart Muse," said Loic Hamon, vice president of products and marketing, NFC business, at INSIDE Contactless. "In addition to delivering information about exhibits, Smart Muse caters to younger consumers' enthusiastic use of social media technologies through NFC-enabled mobile handset peering to share information and their experiences."

Smart Muse launched October 9, allowing teen visitors to wave Wave-Me-enabled handsets near a corresponding Wave-Me NFC tag to access information and synchronize locations with friends in the gallery. Teens can also simply touch mobile handsets together to share information and their experiences while at the gallery. The Centre Pompidou project is one of 13 projects selected by France's Ministry of Economy, Industry and Employment to develop and deploy new services and applications based on NFC technology.

"Smart Muse deployments revolutionize the concept of guided tours and deliver another level of engagement for visitors in museums, at historic monuments, and other locations of interest," said Laetitia Gazel Anthoine, founder and CEO of CONNECTHINGS. "We believe that Wave-Me solutions create exciting new opportunities for delivering richer, more engaging visits and demonstrating the ability of NFC to go beyond just payments and transit applications."

Wave-Me technology automatically simulates a complex series of keystrokes that would be required to achieve the same level of information access using a traditional computing device. Wave-Me tags can contain relevant phone numbers or complex URLs to send SMS messages, or to send and retrieve information from web sites. Museums and cities will be able to provide Wave-Me applications to their visitors, with the possibility of using NFC tags deployed in their environment to access services.

These tags will provide quick access not only to a multimedia guide but also to added-value features like annotation, content sharing, accompanying sound or video. Smart Muse also is deployed in the City of Nice. Multilingual content was developed in conjunction with the City of Nice to be both informative and anecdotal in nature, as well as tailored to the individual's demographics. Smart Muse also provides information about nearby tourist services-shops, restaurants, hotels, city services, events, and others-and the content will be updated constantly.

Among the consortium, CONNECTHINGS delivers knowledge from its AdTag(tm) server-side contextualized content management, as well as its experience with NFC tag and mobile application life cycle management and other technologies. INSIDE provides NFC technology know-how, NFC hardware and software for the handset based upon the market-leading MicroRead(r) NFC controller, and NFC tags and other patented technology. SAGEM Wireless provides the NFC-enabled mobile phones used at the Centre Pompidou and are provided to visitors at no cost for use while inside the museum.

"We are very excited to be a part of the Smart Muse project and to help demonstrate how the Wave-Me Service Platform's innovative use of NFC technology can simplify access to information," said Thierry Buffenoir, chief executive officer of SAGEM Wireless. "We are happy to work with our consortium partners in creating successful projects that will ignite this emerging market."