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Omar Seyal is a co-founder at Egomotion, Corp., which owns and runs Near Field Communication (NFC) business Tagstand. Tagstand, a Y-Combinator backed startup, wants to be at the forefront of this technology, both from a B2B and B2C perspective. Omar’s got over five years experience at tech startups and over ten as a software developer. Personally, I really believe NFC and the whole concept of touch-and-go experiences are the direction things are going (imagine only needing to carry your phone instead of credit cards and IDs, that’s what it can do). Omar was gracious enough to talk with me about the industry, what Tagstand’s doing, and where things are going. You can follow Omar on Twitter at @omarseyal, while his home base online is http://omarseyal.me/.
So, for those who don’t know, can you start off by explain what NFC is and does?
Effectively, NFC is the intersection of offline and online experiences. You can just touch things, and that makes something else happen. You can call it a bunch of things: tap-to-X, NFC, micro location identification. But the reality is you can turn a small gesture, a tap at a specific place, into anything. Anything can be posting to Facebook, recording an email, making a payment. It could be the acquisition of a coupon. It could be two phones exchanging information. It’s just the capacity to take a very specific action, a tap to a very specific place, and react to it computational and programmatically.
Great, so that’s the background. Can you talk about what Tagstand is doing in this space?
Basically, the analogy we make, and it’s a big one, is in the early days of PC’s, a bunch of people were just way into it and a bunch of other people thought it was dumb. You could see it had this huge revolutionary capacity. It added computing power to everyday tasks. And so, people formed little companies that got in touch with the hobbyists, then they kept growing and growing until some of them took off. We feel that way about sensors, like RFID and NFC, and specifically NFC because there’s a standard around it. Just over a year ago, we could see there was a small community forming. People really wanted to use the technology and it made its way to early adopter phones. We also saw a need. The hobbyists didn’t have a place to get passive tags. They didn’t have anyone building libraries for them, being their advocate. It was entirely B2B. And if you think about it, most great technologies don’t take off if they’re just B2B. So we tried to fill the gap and play with the hobbyists, and that’s how we started Tagstand. If you notice, our site looks like it’s for hobbyists, and it is.
So we sold tags, and we started getting leads on what people wanted beyond tags. They wanted a way to take tags and change content, without actually reprogramming them. So we created Tagstand Manager. We started getting leads from larger companies, like Nokia saying they’d love to use that in their advertising deployment. So we kept playing and paying attention and joined forces with this guy Josh Krohn. He wrote NFC Tasklauncher. We noticed he was on the same path, not doing it full time, but he was making NFC more useful. In his case, he was writing an app for the phone that extended the capabilities of NFC beyond just the standard. The standard says you can open a website or a block of text when a phone taps a tag. Josh made it so you can execute really complex macros using applications. Join a phone to a wifi network, or Bluetooth network, or both just by tapping to one tag. You could change the background of a phone, install two applications. So anyway, we got him to join the team and got the application on board. That’s kind of of what we did with phones and tags. We just view it as working with hobbyists to make NFC more and more useful.
On the flipside, NFC has tons of applications without phones. If the first is B2C, with phones as the primary consumer tool, there’s also a chance to build infrastructure for people starting companies using hardware. So that’s kind of of where this whole events thing started. It would be really cool to make hardware that’s programmable or usable like software. So we made these little readers and little tags, so that the interactions between them are configurable using software. So if we go to an event, and say we have ten thousand tags and twenty readers, you can just program what information is bound to each tab and what it will trigger. So it makes for a very flexible platform, and it’s growing in flexibility, usability, and customizability. You can use the same platform, of readers and tags, or bracelets, or cards, for loyalty, or any number of product ideas. That’s the road we’ve gone down.
That leads me to my next question. I actually discovered Tagstand through a Tech Crunch article where you NFC-enabled the New York Public Library’s opening gala. How did that experience go?
That was fun. I don’t think I’ve ever done an event that was that fun, or worked one at least. It wasn’t just fun, it was incredibly insightful. The numbers that we got out of that event were shocking, for a first time big scale affair. We had never done anything at that scale. With very low promotion, 30% of the guests used the bracelet and actively tapped. On average, that person tapped eight times. Of those eight times, 20% of those taps translated into Facebook posts, likes, or tweets. That’s a remarkable number. A third of the attendees basically tweeted about the event. If you think of the broadcasting platform that creates, it’s quite good. We were really encouraged. From a technical standpoint, we were also really encouraged. We only had one failure at the event, but it was eighty readers and due to a quick WiFi issue. We just set up a quick 4G hotspot and solved it.
We’re still at the stage where we need to be very attentive to our own hardware and applications, and in some ways we consult for ourselves. It’s very encouraging to see that we’re only a couple feet short of a turnkey solution, where someone buys hardware from us, configures it through web services, and anyone can use it. Then we just take a fee.
One concerning thing about NFC technology is the lack of consumer adoption. It’s frequently touted as the next big thing, but it’s not in everyone’s hands or they don’t know about it. What’s standing in the way of widespread adoption?
So, it’s funny because people say that and they mean it’s not on all phones. I guess that’s why we go after the second route, around events. Most of the adoption issues are B2C, because they’re dependent on phones. The main barrier is effectively time. I would challenge you to think of one major feature that’s reached one or two flagship smartphones and has failed to reach all smartphones within x-years. NFC has made its way to a flagship smartphone, you would expect over time it would reach all smartphones. The barrier is just time.
From a B2B adoption standpoint, it’s pretty much been adopted. They just haven’t adopted it so it’s integrated with consumer experience. We see hotels using NFC cards, we’re seeing NFC and RFID chips in credit cards, when we drive and people use FastTrack or EZ Pass, that’s RFID. We see it adopted by businesses, so there’s nothing to be concerned about. The consumer is just waiting, but there’s an inevitability that it’s happening.
Through Tagstand’s short history, what’s the biggest thing you’ve learned so far?
I guess, when the three of us got in here, we tried to think of cool revolutionary things to do with NFC. The reality is the whole tap-to-X experience is revolutionary in and of itself. You can do very mundane things, but if you make it happen with a simple tag it makes it a bit revolutionary. We did a lobster roll event a little while ago, and instead of filling out a card, they just tapped a station sitting outside of the food stand after eating. The customer engagement was 3x greater. Often, it lowers the barriers to act greatly. It’s that people can do it so much easier and it makes the experience easier as a whole.
What’s up next for Tagstand?
Focusing on the web services that underlie the events platform, that’s a big deal. Making NFC Tasklauncher more feature rich, so people can do even more creative things by just tapping their phones to a passive tag. We’re focusing on those two, but we’re going down the road open minded. As we see people doing cool things with NFC, we’re happy to branch out and look into new projects.
Who’s had the most influence on you from a professional standpoint?
PG. Paul Graham. I know, it’s the easy answer. When we first sat down with him and talked about Tagstand, he was pretty excited. We kept complaining about the NFC environment’s infrastructure, world, and community. He told us we were looking at it wrong. We needed to be the ones to bring the NFC revolution to the world. That’s what Microsoft did. They knew there would be a computer on every desk and they wanted their software running on that computer. That’s how we look at it. There’s going to be a lot of ways for you to use NFC to connect the world to your apps and devices through which you live. We want those apps to interact easily with NFC passive tags or devices. I think that was a very clarifying moment for us. We looked at the NFC community and realized we’re not just a part of it, we’re advocates of it, and we’re going to make it work. It’s empowering and it gives you a very specific vision at the company.
Alright, last question. What’s the coolest startup that you know besides Tagstand?
I like Askolo. It’s like some combination of a fireside chat and Quora. I can’t explain it better than that. It’s cool because people answer questions about themselves in a Quora type environment. You end up with a wiki about a person which I think is pretty useful. It’s almost Facebook to me, in terms of getting to know something about someone.
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