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Smartrac, the company where I hold the title of Technology Evangelist, is providing the NFC technology in Spyder’s US Ski Team collection of insulator and softshell ski jackets. Combined with an NFC-ready smartphone or tablet, these jackets can connect you to the US Ski Team and local ski information with a single tap.

What’s Spyder?

If you’re into skiing, and especially racing, you’ve probably heard of Spyder. It was founded by David Jacobs, a former Canadian downhill skiing champion and head coach of the Canadian National Ski Team. When his sons followed in his footsteps and joined the ski racing circuit, only one brand of race sweaters was on the market, and he thought he could do a better job. He designed a better race sweater, and then ski pants that skiers nicknamed “spider pants”. Inspired by the nickname and his other passion — sports cars (“spyder” is another name for “roadster”) — he changed his company name to Spyder.

Spyder have never been afraid to experiment with new technologies. In 1994, Jacobs was granted a patent on SpeedWyre, which used a seam on the surface on Spyder’s racing suits to smooth the airflow around their wearer, reducing wind drag by up to 40% in laboratory tests. The US Ski Team wore SpeedWyre-equipped suits and captured the top spots in worldwide competitions in the mid-’90s. SpeedWyre’s downfall was that it was too good — it was so effective at reducing drag that FIS (the International Ski Federation) banned it from competitions in 1997, saying that it gave skiers an unfair advantage.

If you love skiing and are a fan on the US Ski Team, you’ll want to check out Spyder’s NFC-enabled US Ski Team collection of jackets. They still feature the warm, easy-to-move-in, aerodynamic design that Spyder is famous for, but they now feature Smartrac’s Internet of Things technology.

When you tap an NFC-ready smartphone or tablet (such as Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge) against the NFC touchpoint embedded in these jackets’ Spyder logos, you can find out skiing-relation information about your current location, including snow conditions, trails, points of interest, and local events. As a bonus, you can also connect with members of the US Ski Team through various social media channels.

The idea of tapping your phone against your jacket to get to online information about snow conditions and trails when you can simply open the browser and enter its URL seems like a silly, superfluous shortcut when you’re warm and sitting comfortably indoors with ungloved hands. However, when you’re on the slopes, the wind is howling and it’s getting dark, and you want to find out if it’s worth risking the shorter black diamond trail versus the longer blue square one, it’s a convenience you’ll really appreciate.

What’s NFC?

NFC is short for near field communications, a radio-based set of communications protocols that allow two devices to “talk” to each other over very short distances (no more than a couple of inches) or for a device to “read” relatively small amounts information stored on a chip that is typically attached to or embedded in a real-world object. The NFC chip embedded in the Spyder jacket logo is what lets you tap it to get ski information.

If you’ve ever made a payment using your smartphone with Apple Pay or Android Pay, or by tapping your credit card against a reader, you’ve used NFC technology. If you’ve used Android Beam to transfer files and photos between two Android phones, you’ve used NFC technology. If you’ve played games activated by action figures — the Disney Infinity games and Skylanders are two examples — you’ve been gaming with NFC technology.

Here’s a quick video brief of NFC technology’s uses and pitfalls:

What’s Smartrac?

Aside from being the company for whom I work, Smartrac is the biggest Internet of Things company you’ve never heard of. The company is headquartered in Amsterdam (with offices and factories worldwide) and was founded in 2000, growing to become a big deal in the business of developing, manufacturing, and supplying RFID transponders, tags, and inlays.

Smartrac is borrowing a page from Apple’s book — and now Microsoft’s and Google’s books — and changing into a full-stack hardware and software company. Our RFID technology makes real-world objects visible to computers and devices, and our Smart Cosmos cloud platform manages information about things and people, how they’re related, how they interact, and the metadata associated with them. Put the two together, and you’ve got the basis for building solutions that connect the physical and digital worlds.

Want to know more about Smartrac and Spyder?

• Check out our press release, titled Spyder launches first outwear collection with NFC technology
• See this article in Spyder’s blog, titled NFC enabled USST collection
• See the jackets in Spyder’s USST NFC collection (and buy one, if you like)

Earlier today at NGPX (the Next Gen Patient Experience conference in Litchfield Park, Arizona), my company SMARTRAC gave a presentation with Cutaneous Information Technologies (CIT) on an improvement on the hospital wristband: The Patient ID Shield.

Today: The hospital wristband

Hospital wristbands are used to identify patients and provide some basic information about the patient to caregivers. The current state-of-the-market technology for hospital wristbands is laser printing or thermal imaging, with support for large, legible fonts and barcodes that enable electronic patient and medication tracking.

Sometimes, a patient will be tagged with one or more additional wristbands to clearly indicate that the patient has a specific condition or that certain procedures should be followed with that patient:

When “stacked” on a patient’s arm, they end up looking like this:

While they are useful safety devices, hospital wristbands have a number of limitations:

• They’re prone to errors. The U.S. Department of Health estimates that misidentification errors cost $1.4 billion per year in the US alone.
• They’re uncomfortable. On patient satisfaction surveys, they universally get a negative score.
• They can cut off circulation or lead to acute compartment syndrome if put on too tightly.
• They can become a source of infection because they can easily get soiled, especially on the inside.
• They can fit insecurely, especially in the case of children. In these cases, it’s too easy to remove and transfer them.
• Their small size limits legibility and limits the information you can put on them.

Soon: The Shield

Click the image to see it at full size.

The Shield is a solution that takes the basic concept of the hospital wristband and enhances it with:

• CIT’s concept of a large, easy-to-read decal applied directly to the patient’s skin that provides caregivers with quick information they can read and additional information that they can access with a mobile device, and
• SMARTRAC’s Enablement solution, which uses its industry-leading RFID tag and inlay technology combined with its Smart Cosmos platform to connect real-world people and things to the digital information associated with them.

The Shield is easier to read than a wristband, and the space it provides for additional allergy and care information means that you don’t need to clutter a patient’s arm with additional wristbands.

In addition to the enhanced human readability, the enhanced machine readability enabled by the combination of barcode and RFID technology means that it’s easy to get detailed information about a patient using a mobile device. The Smart Cosmos platform behind the Shield integrates with EMR systems to offer a fully customizable patient management system to enhance the patient’s safety and experience at the hospital.

Along with CIT, we’re aiming to make Shield technology available to hospitals and other healthcare facilities worldwide next year. It’s part of SMARTRAC’s evolution from a “we make RFID tags and inlays” company to a “we make software and hardware to make objects smarter” company.

Want to know more? Take a look at SMARTRAC’s official news release: Smartrac and CIT to Present Breakthrough Patient Identification Shield Solution at Next Generation Patient Experience Event.

It’s been a while since there’s been a gathering of the Tampa iOS Meetup, but I’m pleased to announce that it will return in January 2017.

My new job — Technology Evangelist at SMARTRAC, an “internet of things” company that will be making some big moves next year — has kept me busy with orientation, work, and travel. As a result, I haven’t been able to put together a meetup in the past couple of months. Now that I’ve gone through the initial “breaking in” phase with the new job, my schedule’s a little more settled, and Tampa iOS Meetups can resume.

I’m in the process of working out the details, but as soon as I’ve secured a space for the January 2017 meetup, I’ll make an announcement on the Tampa iOS Meetup page, the mailing list, and here on Global Nerdy.

If you have any suggestions for a topic that you’d like to see me cover at Tampa iOS Meetup, please let me know — leave a comment here, or drop me a line at joey@joeydevilla.com­!

Microsoft meant to announce the upcoming release of the Visual Studio for Mac at the Connect(); 2016 developer event on Wednesday, but someone accidentally clicked “publish” on the blog entry a little too early (here’s the cached article). With this great news, we’re one step closer to their “pointy logo era”, that time in the 1970s and early- to mid-80s when they made development tools for many, many platforms.

Bill Gates on the cover of TIME magazine, 1984.

For those of you who were too young to remember those days, here’s a quick photographic tour of just a few of the many, many versions of good ol’ Microsoft BASIC, the programming language that gave the company its start in a time when seeing a computer in a home or office was a very unusual thing:

The TRS-80 Model 100 by Radio Shack (yes, Radio Shack once made computers!) was one of the first notebook computers.

The TRS-80 Color Computer, also by Radio Shack, was their only machine not based on an Zilog Z80 processor, but a Motorola 6809 instead.

The Atari 400 and 800 series of computers had a passable built-in BASIC, but if you wanted the real thing, you’d load Atari Microsoft BASIC via cartridge or floppy disk.

The Apple II had its own BASIC — Integer BASIC — but it got superseded by Applesoft BASIC, a dialect of Microsoft BASIC whose name is an amalgam of “Apple” and “Microsoft”.

The IBM PC not only brought personal computing to offices, schools, and homes in the 1980s and 1990s, but many forms of Microsoft BASIC, starting with IBM BASIC.

It’s been a long time since Microsoft has made a full-fledged development environment for the Mac, but the signs of its arrival have been around for a while. Consider Xamarin Studio, whose creators were recently acquired by Microsoft…

…and Visual Studio Code, which is an excellent programmer’s text editor:

Here’s what Visual Studio for Mac will look like:

VS for Mac is based on Xamarin Studio — the Mac version is so much better than the Windows version; Windows folks were much better off using Visual Studio with the Xamarin extension — and gives Mac-based developers the ability to use C# and .NET to build applications for…

• Android
• iOS
• Mac OS

It also supports the ASP.NET Core web development platform for building web service back ends that can live on your on-premises servers or in the cloud on Azure.

VS for Mac is supposed to be the Mac OS counterpart of VS for Windows, and features many of the things that made Visual Studio popular, including IntelliSense:

While it doesn’t support all the project types that the Windows version supports, its solutions use the same MSBuild-based solution and project format, meaning that Mac- and Windows-based developers can share projects for Android, iOS, Mac OS, and ASP.NET development seamlessly.

Microsoft will announce the full details about Visual Studio for Mac at their Connect(); // 2016 conference, which will feature live streams of its keynotes and various session from Wednesday, November 16th through Friday, November 18th. This promises to be an interesting one — make sure you catch it!

They be fo’ real, Gib-dogg!

This morning, I got a message on Facebook Messenger from John Biggs:

I said “Yes” immediately, because as I said on Twitter:

When @johnbiggs messages you with an invite to talk on his podcast in the next couple of minutes, there is only one answer: HELL YES.

— Joey deVilla (@AccordionGuy) October 28, 2016

Technotopia is Biggs’ weekly podcast about a bright future. Here are his own words about it:

Over the past few months I’ve been on a mission: I want to prove that the future is not going to suck. While this project was originally going to end up in a book – and it still will – I’ve started recording a weekly podcast called Technotopia in which I speak to amazing thinkers about the future. We’ve covered the environment, bitcoin, and why the future will be cafes and croissants.

Very soon after his message, we recorded the podcast in a single take, where I talked about my new job at SMARTRAC, the possibilities that RFID technology enables, growing up in the ’80s thinking you were born 20 years too soon while your friends thought they were born 20 years too late, accordion playing, and the sorts of things that you talk about when you love technology and want to use it to make a better future.

The podcast got posted today shortly after noon! Give it a listen using the player below, or subscribe to via the feed!