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RFID Industry Must Educate Public
The need to educate consumers and the general public about RFID was highlighted at the Enterprise Wireless Technology show held last week in London. The Chief Technologist at IT services provider Noblestar said in his keynote address that education is the only way to assuage consumer suspicions of RFID technology. Once apprised of its benefits, he assured, consumers will most likely accept and embrace the technology. The problem now is that "fringe" opponents of RFID such as CASPIAN are far more vocal and effective at getting their message heard. Futuristic applications such as smart refrigerators that recognize their contents and automatically print out grocery lists paint a far more compelling picture than the Orwellian gloom-and-doom trotted out by opponents. Also noted were the many ideas for disabling RFID tags at checkout, a practice that would render privacy concerns moot. Side note: expect a strong resurgency in the privacy debate after last week's FDA approval of VeriChip, a technology that even many RFID proponents find creepy.
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IBM Discusses RFID Travails
At last week's Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise conference held at UCLA, IBM discussed some of the complicating factors that have surfaced as it helps out on RFID pilots for seven Wal-Mart Top 100 suppliers. The biggest problems highlighted came from unexpected radio interference generated by devices and objects situated near RFID tags and readers. Walkie-talkies and forklifts sometimes caused problems, as did less mundane objects like cell-phone radio towers and the insect-zapping devices used in retailers' grocery areas.
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One-Year ROI on this RFID Project
Snack maker Jack Link expects to achieve a return on its RFID investment in less than one year, according to the company's VP of operations. In an atmosphere where many suppliers resent the costly and ROI-less RFID adoption imposed upon them by retailer mandates, Jack Link's story is notable not only because of its bold ROI predictions, but because the company isn't even one of the "Top 100" suppliers mandated by Wal-Mart to comply by January 2005. As part of Wal-Mart's Top 200, the company has all the way until January 2006, but it decided to embrace RFID earlier for reasons other than just mandates: it saw RFID as a way to meet increasingly rigorous federal regulations regarding the tracking of meat products, and it wanted to increase its supply chain visibility. The company will invest $48,000 across the project's four phases and expects that the final implementation will vault the company from a maufacturing-focused firm to one that leverages supply chain management to increase efficiency, enhance sales projecting, and streamline business processes. Technology partners on the project include Avery Dennison, SAMSys Technologies, ABC Computers, SATO America, and Microsoft.
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The Vatican Library Rolls Out RFID
The Vatican Library is pursuing a plan to RFID tag 2 million pieces of its 40-million piece collection. 30,000 pieces have already been tagged since the project began last year. It is estimated that the annual inventory process, which currently requires closing the library for a full month, will take a mere half-day under the new RFID-based system. Seret, the Italian technology firm hired to do the deployment, chose to use RFID tags produced by Texas Instruments, one of the company's official partners. In a testament to just how quickly radio frequency identification has matured, Seret almost didn't even consider using the technology for the Vatican job when they were planning it; at the time, RFID did not seem suited to library asset management. Today, only three years later, library asset management is one of RFID's most popular uses, with many major institutional and national libraries around the world moving forward with ambitious projects.
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Wi-Fi Meets RFID to Take on Theft Prevention
A new RFID system called RFID Enhanced System for Preventing Employee and Customer Theft, or "RespectRFID" for short, has been developed by a group of Washington state-based engineers that claim it is a better solution to the problem of item tracking and theft prevention than the EPC network. Based on a combination of RFID and Wi-Fi, RespectRFID vastly increases the range that RFID tag data can be transmitted, from a few meters to upwards of 300 feet. Unlike current RFID systems, which require that tagged items be passed within relatively close proximity to low-powered readers placed intermittently throughout a store or warehouse, RespectRFID's long range allows the real-time, simultaneous monitoring of up to one million tagged goods. Each transceiver, of which there are two per aisle, has two video cameras attached to it, attesting to the heavy anti-theft focus of the system's design. Camera recording is triggered by exceptional events, such as when a tag stops transmitting according to its expected schedule. The idea is that the system will capture film footage of an illegal event taking place that can later be used in court. Despite the purported improvements by the RespectRFID system to EPC, one has to wonder whether it's simply too late to reverse the momentum of the latter.
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