RFID Gazette

This coming NFL season, fans at the Seattle Seahawks' Qwest Field and the Philadelphia Eagles' Lincoln Financial Field will be able to make cashless purchases with unique personal PowerPay key fobs fitted with an RFID tag. The PowerPay system is developed by Smart System Technologies (SST).

According to the RFID Journal:

"Football is a good place for us to start. Football teams consistently sell out so they have to look for new ways to raise incremental revenues beyond selling seats," says Michael Richardson, chief technology officer at SST, which is based in New York City. For SST, partnering with NFL teams to promote its cashless payments system to their fans creates a way to tie cashless payments into targeted marketing promotions.

Read more: RFID Enters the Sports Arena

VeriChip, the maker of the subdermal human tracking RFID chip, is making strides toward implanting hospital patients with the technology. On Tuesday, the Federal Drug Administration issued a ruling calling for a final review of the product.

According to ZDNet UK:

The idea for employing the tags to identify humans came after the horror of the 11 Septemer, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Fulcher said. Richard Seelig, vice president of medical applications at Applied, saw on TV how firemen were writing their badge numbers on their arm with pen so they could be identified in the event of a disaster.

He inserted Digital Angel tags in his body and told the chief executive that they worked. VeriChip was born.

Read more: RFID tags may be implanted in patients' arms

The data stored on RFID chips may not be as secure as one would hope. Lukas Grunwald, a consultant at DN-Systems Enterprise Solutions GmbH in Germany has developed a new tool, RFDump, which is able to rewrite RFID data. Grunwald fears that this tool could be very useful for shoplifters who would be able to alter the data on an expensive item to read as though it were a commodity.

CNET News.com reports:

When such tools become widely available, hackers and those with less pure motives could use a handheld device and the software to mark expensive goods as cheaper items and walk out through self checkout. Underage hackers could attempt to bypass age restrictions on alcoholic drinks and adult movies, and pranksters could create confusion by randomly swapping tags, requiring that a store do manual inventory.

Grunwald's software program, RFDump, makes rewriting RFIDs easy. While there are significant malicious uses of the program, consumers could also use it to protect themselves, he said.

Read more: RFID tags become hacker target

Two of the biggest names in RFID hardware production have become one with Symbol Technologies' purchase of Matrics.

According to CNET News.com:

Through the acquisition, Symbol significantly adds to the array of products it will bring to the burgeoning market by augmenting its existing line of handheld radio tag scanners with Matrics' fixed-location readers and RFID chips, along with the devices' underlying software. According to Symbol executives, the buyout of Rockville, Md.-based Matrics was meant to give the company the ability to offer a comprehensive RFID package.

Read more: Symbol buys RFID rival Matrics

3M has launched a new RFID inventory system for its partners Ozburn-Hessey Logistics and International Papers so that they may be better equipped by Wal-Mart's deadline.

According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

A worker can use the technology to pick up product and inventory information from several feet away without having to scan each box. [...]

3M entered the RFID business last year when it bought a specialty firm called HighJump Software, which makes inventory control systems for about 700 customers. It successfully test-launched the product this month after working with distribution specialist Ozburn-Hessey Logistics and International Paper.

Read more: 3M radio inventory system launched

More and more libraries are beginning to manage inventory and speed up the checkout process by inserting RFID chips on all of their books. The Berkeley Public Library is beginning the process this week, joining more than 300 RFID libraries around the world to date. Despite the advantages of library RFID use, concerns regarding privacy have mounted.

Katharine Mieszkowski at Salon.com writes:

Many libraries, including Berkeley, are declining to put the name of the book or even the book's ISBN, its international standard book number, on the microchip implanted in it. They're using a unique bar code number instead, one that would have to be hacked out of a library's circulation database to connect it to a specific title. That's not just to assuage the privacy concerns of readers. For inventory management, libraries need to track individual copies of books and not the words between a given book's covers.

Read more: The checkout line -- or the check-you-out line?

Portugal has begun to track dogs with RFID chips.

According to ZDNet UK:

On Friday, Digital Angel, which sells RFID scanning and communications tools for tracking everything from airplanes to farm animals, announced that it had won a $600,000 (£326,396) deal to start affixing radio tags to dogs in Portugal.

The deal was granted under a government initiative to control rabies in the country. Portuguese legislators have mandated that the estimated two million canines in the nation must be implanted with radio tags and registered in a national database by 2007.

Read more: Portugal takes RFID tags to dogs

Phamarceuticals Abbot Laboratories, Phizer, Proctor & Gamble, and Johnston & Johnston have begun item-level tagging bottles of pills.

According to Information Week:

The bottles are being tracked as they move from manufacturers' plants to their distribution centers, then to distributors' facilities, retailers' distribution centers, and, finally, to CVS and Rite-Aid retail pharmacies. McKesson Corp. and Cardinal Health are the participating distributors.

The pharmaceutical industry estimates that between 2% and 7% of all drugs sold globally are counterfeit.

Read more: Drugmakers 'Jumpstart' RFID Tagging of Bottles

China has decided to develop their own RFID standards, according to the Chinese National Standards Management Committee.

Purchasing Magazine Online reports:

The Chinese RFID standard will be compatible with the international standard, but will have its own intellectual property. The major differences are likely to concern radio frequency and other technical factors.

Read more: China to develop its own RFID standard

IBM has announced the arrival of its newest RFID middleware package, WebSphere Product Center Version 5. It will help its users manage their supply chains more effectively and will have built-in support for RFID technology.

According to Market Wire:

Global Data Synchronization, one of the many initiatives for which IBM WebSphere Product Center is being deployed, is a standards-based process by which manufacturers and retailers can exchange product information. In a September, 2003 AMR Research Alert, Kara Romanow identified a potential $40 billion annual savings in data synchronization. IBM WebSphere Product Center can help IBM customers tap into these potential savings by easing the implementation of robust, production-quality global data synchronization.

Read more: IBM Unveils Software to Help Businesses Better Manage Product Information