Google Rolls Out NFC Base Stations for Places Reviews in Tokyo

Google has been very active in the local web space and it's been very keen on pushing its Hotpot, now part of Google Places, service to more users and, more importantly, more businesses. So far though, it's only been experimenting in several cities in the US. Now, finally, Google is making the first small steps in going global with a new campaign in Tokyo. "We’ve been hooking business owners up with a bright red 'Recommended on Google' window sticker. This sticker allows people to get information about the business just by touching it with their NFC-enabled phone," Gregor Hohpe, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.

"Now we’re excited to introduce another NFC experiment in Tokyo. We’ve developed NFC base stations that people can use to quickly and easily share their opinions about various locations in Tokyo," he announced.

Google has chosen Japan for a couple of good reasons, for one, users there are always online with their phones and are much more used to using their handsets for a lot more than calls and surfing the web.

Second and perhaps more importantly, a lot more phones there have NFC chips, there are about 70 million NFC-enabled devices in the wild in Japan already. This compared to the US and Europe where there are only several phone models available for sale.

"When users tap the base station with their NFC-enabled phone they can immediately leave a rating or review for the place where the station is located. They can also star the place for later or share it with friends. Plus, we’ll recommend other places they might love," Hohpe explained.

But Google is starting small, it's only deploying several base stations near Roppongi, in a small area of Tokyo. It's close to the Google offices in the city, but at this stage the roll out is experimental to say the least.

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