When we had our daily lunch in a restaurant we just discovered, we got a sort of simple but new idea. We liked the place so we thought we must share it with others (geeks!). What we did was checking in on foursquare, facebook, … (you name it) wherever today’s open-minded smartphone generation likes to check-in.

One of our less geeky colleagues was wondering why nobody is talking at the table and asked: “What are u guys doing?”. We used our phones and stopped social interaction in real life. So, we figured that checking in physically would be much more comfortable on a social level. How cool was that if you could just check-in by placing your phone against the restaurants wall? … a physical “Like”-button.

As this might have been a simple but cool business idea I checked what is available from RFID and near field communication (NFC) research and who might had this idea already. And, of course, as this is pretty simple there are some approaches and tests out there. So, hopefully we can see physical “Like”-buttons everywhere in near future with NFC in our phones. I would love to see that!

A company in NL has developed a ready to use prototype for facebook places:

http://www.mediamatic.nl/page/44322/nl?lang=en

Coca-Cola did an event where people were able to check-in with wrist bands:

Here’re some links to more details:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=70896

http://blog.getadmetric.com/nfc-easier-than-your-facebook-like-button

Pretty nice. But I did find this as well *ouch* 😀

http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/11/facebook-like-button-rubber-stamped-into-physical-meme/