

NFC Ring - andrewchoi
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mclear/nfc-ring

======
Johnyma22
Disclaimer: I didn't post this thread but I'm the guy running this Kickstarter
and trying to get NFC Rings into the hands of hackers to do beautiful and
wonderful things.

Also worth noting one of the founders of this project is Matt Mullenweg, the
creator of Wordpress.

Some cool things I made with the ring I haven't announced before but you guys
might like..

* An NFC controlled Gun trigger (hold gun with ring in hand and you can fire it) * Various hidden door locks (touch door in right place with ring and it opens)

A huge challenge I face right now is trying to use OpenCV Haarcascades to
measure the width of ring fingers, I have a project up for it
[https://github.com/mclear/html5-measurer](https://github.com/mclear/html5-measurer)
\-- any input from CV guys would be great :) Also worth noting all of the
software for the NFC Ring is under an Apache license.

Thanks @andrewchoi for the post! :) Appreciated!

Thanks Hacker News folks for the support and backing.

I'm heading out for some beers with my dad at 7pm(GMT) but when I'm back or
tomorrow I'm happy to answer questions, in the mean time Tanya will be
answering questions through Kickstarter.

~~~
wpietri
This thing looks awesome. Thanks for making this happen!

I'm sorry to hear that the Galaxy S4 won't work with this. That's the phone
I'm most likely to buy next. Could you say more about why they're
incompatible?

~~~
Johnyma22
The S4 has the NFC antenna in the battery this makes it unable to read small
tags, the Alpha ring does work with it but that ring is only really suitable
for larger chaps.

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jmduke
What a cool idea! I hope they think of a less generic name, because as it
stands there's going to be a lot of mindshare/SEO conflict with NFC
Championship rings.

I hope they can use the success of this kickstarter to figure out
manufacturing efficiencies that enable them to test out more form factors.
Personally, I'm crazy about the idea of a wearable NFC device but I don't like
the aesthetics of a ring: a wristband (or, ideally, something I can attach to
the bottom of my watch face) would be much more preferable.

~~~
Johnyma22
Agree'd on generic name, we spent hours umming and arring about this. I wanted
to go with "McLear Torus" but most people didn't get the joke, so that got
shot down, it's something as an engineering company we are wrestling with, we
have a marketing company working with us working on solving this problem.

Agreed on diversifying into other physical products but that's not in our road
map so we're releasing the NFC Inlays onto the market for people to make their
own items :) You can even 3d print your own NFC Ring!

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morpher
I don't have a lot of experience with NFC, but there are replay attacks of
NFC-based credit cards, e.g., the NFCProxy app discussed a few months ago[1].

Does the small size of the inlay in this ring prevent unintended reading of
the information contained? (It sounds like a larger version is necessary for
some phones to read it at all...)

This is a compelling idea for another authentication factor, provided there
were no concerns about data leakage.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5605499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5605499)

EDIT: The "Privacy is Paramount" video explains how the ring solves this
problem.

------
pathy
A NFC ring does seem like an interesting project, with some useful
applications. I may back the project.

However, the project is only aiming to raise £30,000. Not saying it isn't a
significant amount of money but with backers like Matt Mullenweg (according to
a comment here), surely they can bankroll that themselves? I know starting up
production is expensive and the MOQ is prohibitive. £30k is not that much
money to start manufacturing, distribution, testing and so forth. The
kickstarter seems to me to be essentially just validating that there is a
market for a NFC ring.

The "what are we raising funds for" section also states different things, the
video says MOQ is 100k (x2), while the text says 10k. It seems to me that if
it is the former of the two, £30,000 is not going to get them very far. And,
the company spent $8000[1] on an advert[2]. $8000 (~£5.2k) is quite a
significant portion of those £30,000 they want. Lastly, shipping in September
2013 kind of suggests that they are about to start production/already started
production.

Either they are expecting to raise way more than £30,000 or it is just an
additional way to advertise the product and build hype. Nothing wrong with
that per se, and the backers do get the ring at a discount, but I am
personally not that willing to back them just for them to get extra publicity.

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1ip44s/spent_8...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1ip44s/spent_8000_on_a_marketing_video_for_my_product/)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqvQ0pZhEBY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqvQ0pZhEBY)

~~~
Johnyma22
You are pretty much completely correct: * Yes we are validating, this is
normal (I explain this in my latest blog post on mclear.co.uk) * The MOQ is
100k (well spotted on the 10k mistake, thanks!) * I put most of my life
savings into this project and I could of raised more but that would have meant
losing more control * UK kickstarters tend not to raise huge amounts so yes,
we went in low.

Yea we want to build some hype, obviously we want as much attention as
possible, we have 0 marketing budget left. I honestly don't see a better way
to do this when you are all out of marketing budget and don't want to
sacrifice more control?

~~~
pavedwalden
I don't see anything wrong with that. I'm excited about all the possibilities
of crowdfunding, including market validation and supplementary capital.

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csense
In this instance, NFC stands for Near Field Communications, a two-way RFID
technology built into some cellphones [1].

This is not adequately explained in the Kickstarter, nor is it mentioned in
anyone else's HN comments so far. That two-way RFID is implemented in
commonly-used smartphones is a bit of tech trivia I didn't know until this
article convinced me to Wikipedia [2] NFC.

In retrospect, I'm not sure why I even clicked on this -- to people in the US,
an "NFC ring" is given to the winners of the NFC Championship football [3] [4]
game [5].

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication)

[2] If Google can be a verb, so can Wikipedia.

[3] If you're not from North America, odds are that the sport you call
"football" is actually soccer.

[4]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872981)

[5]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFC_Championship_Game](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFC_Championship_Game)

------
srgseg
This reminds me of Sun's Java Ring which could run Java on its own internal
Java Virtual Machine. It worked through contact rather than wirelessly. It was
given away for free to all attendees of the 1997 JavaWorld conference and I
remember being very excited about it at the time. Maybe, like Oracle's 1996
Network Computer thin client, we're finally ready for this technology.

[http://www.nngroup.com/articles/javaring-wearable-
computer/](http://www.nngroup.com/articles/javaring-wearable-computer/)
[http://javaring.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/advantages-of-
using-j...](http://javaring.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/advantages-of-using-java-
ring.html)

"When an iButton detects any intrusion, it erases its private keys leading to
zeroization. With it zeroization capability and the private key, Java Ring is
one of the least counterfeitable devices."

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fsavard
Reminds me of this (not yet released?) concept, the GEAK ring:

[http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/17/geak-ring-nfc-
finger/](http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/17/geak-ring-nfc-finger/)

The "unlock your smartphone" use case is underlined here, too.

Manufacturer's site (Chinese, can't read it myself):
[http://www.igeak.com/Ring](http://www.igeak.com/Ring)

------
ctz
I love the idea and design of this; it's beautiful.

But using storage-only NFC tags as an authentication token? This is not a good
idea.

~~~
Johnyma22
Watch the video that covers security, it should hopefully explain why we do it
that way. Thanks

~~~
ctz
I'm afraid I think that video just misrepresents how ISO14443A anti-collision
works. Most reader devices (like phones, door locks, etc.) will select the tag
with the best signal (usually = the closest) and deselect others during the
anti-collision protocol. This /doesn't/ rule out a malicious reader selecting
the other tag, subject to being able to power it.

~~~
Johnyma22
Try that in reality and see how it works out for you.

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DavidPP
I bought a couple of tags for my phone new S4 this week. The issue I have
right now is that the tags only seem to get read when my screen is on and
unlocked which mean that I'm only one click away from running a command
anyway, so for now, NFC tags combined with my phone seem less useful that I
first thought.

~~~
iloveponies
The fact you have to have your screen on and unlocked is intentional and by
design, otherwise there is plenty of potential attacks where NFC is used to
exploit phones whilst it's in your pocket.

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Ygor
I was reminded of this:
[http://hybratech.com/products/orb](http://hybratech.com/products/orb)

It is a different concept, but similar enough. After a couple of years still
not available.

~~~
jotm
I don't know if you can call that similar enough - the ORB incorporates way
more active technology than this NFC ring...

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cieplok
I cannot find any informations about size of data that can be stored in NFC
Ring. I hope this is not one of this with 137 bytes. Anybody knows the memory
capacity of a tag?

~~~
DanBC
They're using a NTAG203.

2 is a "platform indicator", 0 is a generation number, and 3 is the code
number for the memory size. 3 means 128 to 256 bytes. (0 is less than 64
bytes; 1 is 64-96 bytes; 2 is 96-128 bytes)

([http://www.nxp.com/documents/short_data_sheet/NTAG203_SDS.pd...](http://www.nxp.com/documents/short_data_sheet/NTAG203_SDS.pdf))

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christiangenco
Ahh yes! I've been playing around with this idea forever - so glad someone's
taking it to kickstarter. Backed!

~~~
christiangenco
Proof:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskTechnology/comments/17s1pd/nfc_or...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskTechnology/comments/17s1pd/nfc_or_rfid_embedded_in_metal_ring/)

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xtc
Neat idea. A good spin on wearable computing.

