Hey Everyone, welcome to 2014, the year of the NFC Ring.

Production update

Over Christmas and New year our team in the UK took it relatively easy, spending time with family and friends. China was very much running at 100%, producing as many rings as possible so we can meet our mid-late Jan shipping deadline which we’re still on track to hit.

App updates

We have worked hard on several App updates and during these updates we discovered we made a mistake, and it’s completely our mistake. Part of our transparency ethos and working with you guys is that we choose to be transparent – meaning we share our successes and our failures. So here it is… we(I John) lost the NFC Ring Keystore file! Doh.. Basically a keystore file is required to push Android app updates and unfortunately there is no way to recover this file. What this means to you is that if you have installed either the NFC Ring or NFC Ring Unlock app you will need to un-install and visit the play store to install again. Updates will not work. Again this is completely my fault, it’s due to a series of failures including an online backup service and several hard disks failing. Thankfully, it’s happened before anyone is regularly using those apps so we will obviously be super careful about ensuring this doesn’t happen again!

The NFC Ring app is now called “NFC Ring Control”. We decided the “NFC Ring” name was a little too vague.

You should have received an email with your verification code for the NFC Ring Unlock app, if you have any NFC inlays or tags lying around you can start tinkering with this now, we’d like to get as many bugs/issues resolved as possible before the Rings start landing.

Please remember that NFC Ring Unlock is beta software so we’d appreciate as much feedback as possible so we can get any issues resolved before your rings arrive. Bug requests and issues can be filed either through support@nfcring.com or on our bugtracker at and any FAQs are available on our wiki which is editable by you, the NFC Ring community.

Don’t forget to uninstall the apps and search for them on the play store!

DIRECT LINK TO NFC RING CONTROL

DIRECT LINK TO NFC RING UNLOCK

Sweet Spot community database

The NFC Ring Control app now supports some logic for our community to provide sweet spot information to people who have a similar phone. After you find your phones sweet spot the app will ask you if you want to share the location with other NFC Ring owners, selecting yes will prompt you to press the screen in the rough location you found your sweet spot. The next time someone who has the same phone as you comes to find their sweet spot a heatmap will show up showing all community suggestions – in theory making it easier to identify the location and in the future, orientation. We intend to make this data open source for other small NFC Tag projects and also to help you make a decision about which will work best with your ring. Stats are important, facts and figures equally so. We want you to be able to make informed decisions and we believe providing you with a means to support each other is the right way forward. This means when new phones arrive on the market you guys can provide sweet spot locations to each other instead of depending on us to test each phone. It also puts pressure on phone manufacturers to start thinking about small NFC antennas, something we’re keen to see.

NFC Ring at CES

Three stands have some NFC Ring prototypes at CES:

HzO – Try grab Scott Bean

Undertone – Try grab Tom Woods

Fashionware – Try grab Julie Sylester

NFC Ring in magazines

The NFC Ring is covered in February Wired US and Wired UK and also next month we’re featured in a German tech magazine called PAGE.
Returns and Refunds policy

We invited you to share your thoughts and opinions on how we should structure our returns and refunds policy and we’re pleased to say we received a huge response from a large number of backers and also potential future Ring Bearers, thank you for this. If you missed our blog update about this there is still a few days to have your say over at the Returns and Refund policy blog post.

Birthday wishes

Please join us in sharing your birthday wishes to one of the first believers of the NFC Ring, Matt Mullenweg without his help we wouldn’t be on the journey we are all on together. He is attempting to raise $30k for charity and we’d very much appreciate your support in helping him reach way beyond his goal.

Finally a reminder

We have actually cut this update in half, we have so much going on right now that it would have been too much to update everything at once so expect to see an update in 7 days.

Remember to uninstall the Android apps and do a clean install from the play store, follow us on social media/email and add the rss feed from our blog to your rss reader!