$ Farpost · Glossary
Technical terms used elsewhere on Farpost’s pages, translated for a reader who wasn’t in the room when the decision was made.
- Twilio, in layman’s terms
- Twilio is a company that lets software send and receive real phone calls and text messages without a business having to build its own telecom infrastructure. Think of it as a phone network you control entirely through code — the same way a payment processor lets a website accept credit cards without becoming its own bank.
- NFC/RFID, in layman’s terms
- Both are ways for a small chip to talk to a nearby device wirelessly, over a few centimeters, with no battery of its own — the same technology behind tap-to-pay cards and building-access fobs. NFC usually means the shorter-range, phone-tap kind; RFID is the broader umbrella term. Stuck to a physical object, a chip like this lets a phone "read" a permanent digital record just by tapping it — a durable link between a real, physical thing and the data about it.