Connecting Business Owners and Customers in Tokyo

Google Places is all about connecting with the places you love. For the past several months, the Google Places team has been spreading the word in select U.S. cities — like Portland, Oregon and Austin, Texas — about how small business owners can better connect with their customers. As part of these campaigns, 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.

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. 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.

 

Why do this experiment in Japan? As is often the case, Japan is ahead of the rest of the world in adopting NFC technology. Millions of people use this technology every day to make contact-less payments, to retrieve coupons, and to play games. This is all made possible because roughly 70 million Japanese handsets, and an increasing number of Japanese Android-powered handsets, are already equipped with NFC.

Our NFC stations will be located in a small group of participating businesses near Roppongi, right in the middle of Tokyo. The proximity to our Google Japan office will help our team work closely with these local merchants to collect their feedback and help them engage with their customers. So if you’re out and about in Roppongi and see one of these stations, we encourage you to pull out your phone and try this fun way to rate or review your favorite places!

Posted by Gregor Hohpe, Software Engineer