RFID Gazette

United Parcel Service has been using active RFID tags to track trailers for 15 years. But now, the shipping company is piloting passive RFID tags and multiprotocol readers.

According to InformationWeek:

UPS has tested RFID products from vendors such as Alien Technology Corp. and Matrics Inc. But the company's goal is to switch to what Nonneman calls "agile readers" or multiprotocol readers, which have broader capabilities than Class 0 and class 1 readers. "UPS has many retailer characteristics; therefore, it can't use a single class tag.

Read more: UPS Steps Up RFID Efforts

Microsoft Business Solutions-Navision is integrating Jack Link's Beef Jerky's pallet-level RFID tags shipping from the snack manufacturer to Wal-Mart stores. Jack Link's Beef Jerky is a meat manufacturer and therefore must meet U.S. Department of Agriculture traceability requirements.

According to InformationWeek:

Although Jack Link's Beef Jerky has never experienced an actual meat recall, it carries out frequent mock recalls that show it takes between 12 and 16 hours to manually track every case that came out of one specific lot recall. That's because the company needs to track the customers it shipped to as well as sales orders to which the shipment is tied. "I'm shooting from the hip, but I bet with RFID we can get this processes in under a half an hour," Paepke says.

Read more: RFID Gives Manufacturer A Better Handle On Its Snacks

OATSystems Inc., a middleware provider, and BearingPoint, a business consulting firm, have teamed with Hewlett-Packard to help industries and retail providers implement RFID technology.

According to InformationWeek:

RFID/IS (Industrial Strength), which was designed to fit the needs of the automotive, consumer packaged-goods, pharmaceutical, consumer electronics, high-tech, and retail customers, combines an RFID framework, systems management, and consulting and integration services into a single platform. HP has chosen OATSystems as its middleware partner. The OAT Foundation Suite offers software with four layers--RFID system of record, business-context layer, EPC number management, and RFID middleware--to run with HP's RFID infrastructure.

Read more: HP Bolsters RFID Offerings With Partners

IBM's new sensor network for business unit will employ approximately 1,000 people and will focus on mobile sensor technology integration, which starts with the passive RFID chip.

According to the New York Times:

"We are moving from batches of information about operations to continuous visibility," said Gary Cohen, general manager of the pervasive computing group at International Business Machines. [...]

I.B.M.'s goal, analysts said, is to persuade businesses to view radio tagging - one of the hottest growth areas for mobile sensor technology - as just one element of a new wave of information technology outside of data centers that must be integrated to be exploited.

Radio tags can be read in groups instead of one by one, and they hold far more data than bar codes.

Read more: What's in the Box? Radio Tags Know That, and More

RSA Laboratories, the research arm of RSA Security, is currently developing an RFID blocker tag that will prevent unauthorized RFID readers from reading valuable data from RFID tags.

According to ferret.com.au:

"In a naive, RFID-enabled world without technical forethought, there is risk that sensitive information could be visible in secret to anyone with an RFID reader," said Burt Kaliski, director and chief scientist with RSA Laboratories in the US.

"Moreover, the unique serial numbers emitted by RFID tags could be used to track people and objects surreptitiously."

Read more: RFID tag blocker

The new RFID-enabled radition detection system from AXCESS International will be demonstrated at next week's American Society of Industrial Security (ASIS) Annual Seminar and Exhibits Show. The system will employ RFID technology to alert users of harmful gamma radiation which could be used in a terrorist dirty bomb attack.

According to Yahoo! Finance:

The network-based solution integrates the RADITECT(TM) detector with the AXCESS ActiveTag(TM) wireless sensor technology. The ActiveTag(TM) RFID unit is integrated into the RADITECT(TM) detector to receive and transmit an alarm condition brought on by the presence of an increase in gamma radiation around the device. The system can detect the presence of radiation equal to a single X-Ray. A single detection unit or multiple units networked together can be monitored by an infrastructure of RFID receivers connected to the network or the Internet using AXCESS' Onlinesupervisor(TM) software.

Read more:

While RFID is taking off in businesses around the globe, many still worry about high cost and integration difficulties that come with RFID.

According to eWeek:

The survey, which was conducted among 135 attendees at last week's Frontline Solutions show in Chicago and released Wednesday, found that 22 percent of respondents have already launched an RFID pilot. Another 42 percent plan to implement RFID within the next 12 months, while 21 percent are looking at deployments 12 to 24 months down the road. [...]

"But when two big customers [Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense] issue mandates, it definitely accelerates the market," acknowledged Eric Hermelee, Wavelink's vice president of marketing, in an interview with eWEEK.com.

Read more: Survey: RFID Users Fret over Cost, Integration

The world's first bluetooth-enabled handheld RFID reader has been released by co-creators Cathexis Innovations and Baracoda Wireless Technology.

According to Cathexis:

IDBlue™ is a powerful tool with versatility that allows you to do many things not previously possible with other RFID readers. IDBlue™ harnesses RFID technology of through automatically identifying a unique asset with pinpoint accuracy. In addition IDBlue™ stores important information on the asset itself, greatly increasing efficiency managing assets.

Read more: Introducing the World’s First Bluetooth® Enabled RFID Handheld Reader

From eWeek, an article explains that while RFID has shown huge potential, security and privacy concerns still loom large.

Other nations aren't necessarily about to enthusiastically embrace standards forged by the U.S. Defense Department, said Holmes, who is director of port development at SAIC (Science Applications International Corp.) and a former Coast Guard captain of the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach.

For their part, customs officials from other countries worry that RFID isn't tamper-proof enough, said a U.S. government official attending the conference, who asked not to be identified.

"Their worst nightmare is that somebody might put the wrong [RFID] tags on whatever is really 'inside the box.'

Read more: Needs for Standards, Privacy Top RFID Concerns

Boeing will issue RFID specifications to its suppliers sometime in the first half of 2005, according to word out of the Frontline Solutions Conference and Exposition.

From Computerworld:

The specifications will spell out Boeing's technical standards relating to issues such as the frequency, memory capacity and size of RFID tags and labels. Suppliers that ship parts to Boeing will eventually need to label their components with RFID tags that meet the specifications.

However, there will be no mandate from Boeing requiring suppliers to implement RFID tagging right away, said Daryl Remily, deputy program manager of the company's Auto-ID program.

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