I’m helping a startup that wants a farm-to-market goods solution for helping connect farmers and consumers better. The idea is that you’d have an NFC tag on bulk packaging (e.g. crates, etc), a farmer could tap his smartphone to the crate, then attach text/pictures/videos about the goods still at the farm (being loaded, picked, etc). When the crate gets to the market and is put on the table, a NFC reader reads the tag and displays static info associated with the farm and farmer (text, pictures, videos, a map… things like how the products are raised, when people can visit the farm, etc) and the current product (any text/pictures/videos attached by the farmer, as well as the timestamp).

I can think of half a million ways to write an app to do this, but I’d ideally prefer a more turnkey solution (ideally free), at least on the phone side. For example, is there a way that an NFC tag could open up an (app? URL?) that allows the input of timestamped text/images/videos to either be sent or stored somewhere accessible online? Then the market-side could receive or download all text/images/video, and scripts could piece together the presentation to show to customers for the most recently-scanned NFC tag based on the URL in that tag.

I’m thinking maybe something like tags directing them to the upload page of a service like Instagram or Flickr on one or more accounts (the URL would need to be able to direct it to upload in a NFC-tag-specific folder or to unique no-login-required accounts, or otherwise somehow tag the uploaded content uniquely based on the URL encoded from the NFC tag). You couldn’t include text without a picture if you’re using a photo upload service, but so long as the service has an easy way to select to take and upload a picture from a smartphone, and the upload URLs can be tag-unique in a manner that has an effect on where or how the pictures are stored, I’d think that would work. The market side would then just need to scrape the site for new content from known accounts. No?

What do you think? Might there be an easier way?