The NFC Forum Global Competition in a competition for developers and companies working with NFC Technology. The upping competition will take place at WIMA 2009 in Moncao. Proposals for the applications to be developed can be handed in until January 30th, 2009. More Details

In 2008 out of the 10 finalists of the NFC Competition three teams came for the University of Applied Sciences in Upper Austria. The NFC Ski Theft Deterrent System actually won the third price in the end.

This week I have been at the Forum Nokia Event in Budapest (HU). On Wednesday there was a Code Camp on Widgets which was given by Riku Salminen.

As “in my former life” I studied media technology and dealed a lot with website I was quite excited about widgets, which I have never worked with before. I was really surprise how easy and fast the development of Widget is. This was actually the first time I also was confronted with enhanced JavaScript that is also used in AJAX.

To get more family with the technology I developed a widget to query the online portal of the federal railways of Austria (ÖBB). In order to make the query easier for the user, he can select out of predefined train stations to start and end the journey. Then the query is sent to the website and gives the next three trains that the user can take. Among the participants of the Code Camp a N85 was given to the developer of the best widget (voting by audience), which was actually me. ;-) Thank you Nokia!

You can download the first prototype from the FN Wiki. Please remember, that this is a prototype and therefore there is no guarantee that the application is working properly. It should just give you an idea how widgets are working. As it was also my first widgets, there are several components that could be improved from a software engineering point of view.