RFID Gazette

Billion-dollar anti-terrorism initiative, US-VISIT, is about to receive an upgrade. Soon all United States-bound landed immigrants and non-Canadian citizens, who already are required to have a temporary Visa, must undergo additional RFID-related steps before entering the States. When crossing the land border, visitors will have to get finger scans and biometric digital photographs. Information from each person will be cross-referenced with FBI databases to ensure no one passing is linked to terrorist activities. The information will be stored on a card that visitors will obtain on their first entry across the border. According to Today's Trucking:

Canadian citizens are the only ones in the world who are exempt from US-VISIT. However, thanks to lobbing by the Canadian Trucking Alliance and other business trade groups, the U.S. has also to some degree exempted permanent resident truck drivers from the program.

Read more: Homeland Security Unveils RFID Component to US-VISIT

Last year, Dr. John Halamka, CIO at Harvard Medical School, agreed to the implantation of a VeriChip tag under his arm. Coded within the chip is information on Halamka's medical records and primary care physician. He suggests that certain people could greatly benefit from the tagging, such as patients with Alzheimer's disease that may not be able to give their information. Since the implant, Dr. Halamka has noted the importance of implementing standards that will protect the unauthorized access of information from the tag. Yet, beyond that, Halmaka has claimed to experience social and cultural forces that suggest he has lost his personal privacy without the actual transmittance of information. According to E-Health Insider:

..."Friends and associates have commented that I am now 'marked' and lost my anonymity. Several colleagues find the notices of a device implanted under the skins to be dehumanising."

Read more: Doctor Tagged With RFID Worries About Privacy

Marketers have found yet another use for RFID chips: inserting them into clothing. The RFID-equipped clothing is being designed to serve various functions. A new clothing line, Lauren Scott, hopes to prevent in-home child abductions by sounding an alarm when a child wearing the clothing goes beyond 30 feet of the house. Target plans to begin selling the line next spring. To reduce counterfeiting, some designers are considering inserting tags in their labels. RFID tags may also be used in the future to decrease the number of fraudulent merchandise returns. Currently false returns cost the retail industry $15 billion annually. According to World Peace Herald:

"We've been contacted about this by retailers," said Tawnya Clark, vice president of sales and marketing at RSI ID Technologies in Chula Vista, Calif., a maker of RFID products. "They want to use RFID not only to track the clothes in the warehouse and during shipping. They want to track the clothes when they are bought by customers."

Read more: Wireless World: Anti-Theft RFID Clothing

25 – 28 October
Sandton Convention Centre
Johannesburg, South Africa

In its eleventh successful year, Cards Africa 2005 promises to deliver unique solutions to the African finance, information and communications environment. This event is recognized globally as Africa’s dedicated cards event. The event offers you the only opportunity to get up to speed with developments and innovations in African smart card implementation. Smart cards are experiencing tremendous growth in Africa. New and exciting opportunities for the banking and mobile commerce industries in terms of payments and transactions, m-commerce and value-add applications are dominating the industry.

The smart card is becoming an important tool for enterprises to differentiate themselves from their competition. We are entering a new era in smart card implementation! Smart cards are evolving from being just a secure means of payment to a widespread tool for authentication, security and identity documents, as well as host to a multitude of applications. The smart card market has grown to facilitate the mobile commerce industry globally.

Cards Africa 2005 comes to you together with Africa’s leading RFID conference that will provide the latest information regarding this revolutionary technology.

RFID World Africa 2005 showcases the opportunities that exist by implementing RFID technology in an organisation. Delegates will learn how RFID technology can be implemented to achieve greater labour efficiency and reduce errors, decrease theft by enabling asset tracking, facilitate realtime personnel location, enhance security, improve demand forecasting accuracy while reducing critical order cycle times and improving the supply chain and production times.

The event will attract participation internationally and across the African continent from the following sectors: retail, information technology, security and defence, supply chain management, mining, transport, asset management and manufacturing.

Cards Africa and RFID World Africa are senior-level interactive conferences that offer a Terrapinn experience, which includes:

Speed networking – interesting and efficient in a powerful half an hour networking session, enabling delegates to quickly meet with industry peers.

Interactive round table discussion - time set aside for delegates to meet and discuss issues with relevance to their job functions. Delegates have the option to choose from four different topics with each topic led by an industry chosen expert to lead the discussion.

Interactive panel sessions – each Terrapinn conference offers you interesting interactive panel discussions. The “chat show” style sessions offers you the chance to ask the questions you want answers for! You will not get a better chance to question the leading players in the industry directly. Consider it an unfair advantage.

Networking luncheons – virtually all our lunches are stand up buffets that offer delegates the chance to meet and network with people that they’re particularly interested in, rather than the rather random forced seating offered by seated lunches.

Masterclasses – most Terrapinn conferences feature from one to three Masterclasses. These are one-day training courses, presented by an expert trainer or facilitator, offering a chance to really get to grips with a particular aspect of their industry or responsibility.

For more information, please contact Megan Hainsworth or visit the official event website at http://www.worldofcards.biz/2005/cardsza

Megan Hainsworth
Marketing Manager
Terrapinn Ltd

Tel:
Fax:

Today AIM Global suggested that the complexities of the RFID industry far exceed the issues of standards and customer mandates. Instead, the industry is susceptible to the forces of the Chaos Theory--meaning that many factors are at work. In an elementary definition of the Chaos Theory, what seem to be random bits of data or events are really contributing to an overall order. The "Butterfly Effect" is an extention of the theory. It says that major outcomes are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. The result? The variables contributing to the formation and outcome of RFID are so numerous, that no conclusion about the technology can yet be made. What's important is that RFID be analyzed in a broad context. According to RFID.org:

The truth is, RFID is just as susceptible (if not more so) to the "butterfly effect" of seemingly unrelated events as everything else in today's global economy...we have to stay flexible and not get locked into a single perspective.

Read more: Editorial: Chaos Theory and RFID

Mark Anderson is a computing and telecom consultant and founder of "Future in Review" conferences that feature the latest in technology. His perspective on the current technology climate is that not enough is going on, that there is a "dearth of innovation." He blames it on the monopolistic nature of the tech industry. RFID, he claims, is not overly hyped, but rather merely on the "fringes" of innovations. RFID has the potential to open a whole new world to businesses and change the way they communicate. Anderson believes that big change will evolve once industries begin to intersect. For example, once PC's and RFID are fully integrated true innovations in business will emerge. According to BusinessWeek:

...how these technologies work together -- [for instance, how grids can derive patterns from information gathered by RFID tags] -- that's really interesting.

Read more: Tech's "Dearth of Innovation"

The Directorate General of Telecommunications in Taiwan has approved the issuance of official RFID licenses to more Taiwan companies. These companies will follow the Taiwan company Pretide which has already received licensing. The approval will permit chosen companies to manufacture passive UHF RFID systems. Expected to receive licenses include Cimtrac and Asian Smart Tag. The only major difference between the regulations in Taiwan and those in the US are the frequency the tags run on. The tags in Taiwan run on a narrower frequency of 922-928MHz. According to DigiTimes:

Charles Lai, the managing director of Cimtrac, said at the Taiwan International Auto-ID Exhibition in Taipei that the company will begin shipments of RFID systems supporting the EPCglobal UHF Generation 2 (EPC Gen2) standard, which was approved in December 2004. He also said that EPC Gen2 tag and reader samples can be supplied to the North America starting next month and volume shipments may begin late in the third quarter or in the fourth quarter.

Read more: More Taiwan Licenses for Passive UHF RFID Systems to be Issued Soon

What has caused the sudden RFID buzz followed by predictions of an industry shakeout before it has even had time to mature? Some experts are pointing fingers at large retailers like WalMart and the U.S. Department of Defense. Their mandates on suppliers to adopt RFID possibly spurred a premature RFID craze and overly optimistic spending forecasts. A study by AMR Research indicated that the number one reason for deploying RFID over the course of the next year was due to customer mandates. With the price of the technology still high, many companies not facing customer mandates are opting not to rollout the technology. This leaves some experts believing that industry consolidation is inevitable since current spending levels won't support the large number of vendors that have emerged. According to Forbes.com:

The mandates “prematurely accelerated” RFID into the mainstream, wrote Gaughan, and suppliers are complying in order to keep their relationships with large customers. It usually takes emerging technologies five to ten years to reach a level that will support broad industry adoption.

Read more: The Great RFID Experiment that Wasn't

Some analysts predict a major shakeout in the RFID industry within six to nine months. Potential acquisitions and consolidations are in store as the industry attempts to develop more business-focused RFID systems. This means that many existing vendors and technologies may end up flopping. Currently, movement within the industry is evident as companies expand into RFID software. For example, Erik Michielsen, ABI Research's director of RFID, notes that SAP is now extending from enterprise application space into areas traditionally done by companies such as Acsis and GlobeRanger. These types of transitions leave analysts like Michielsen believing that the face of the industry is bound to change. According to VNUNet.com:

"I think they would be better off partnering and focusing the resulting free energy on services and higher-end software," he concluded.

Read more: RFID Industry Heading for Shakeout

Michael Stonebraker, CTO of StreamBase Systems, foresees endless opportunities for RFID. From increasing the accuracy of parking meters to improving storm monitoring, nothing seems out of reach for RFID. For example, currently the strength and path of storm winds can often only be plotted after the fact, once the weather data from sensors is collected. RFID's power lies in its potential to easily produce massive amounts of real-time data. With RFID sensors enabled, complete weather information could always be derived while it is happening. Stonerbraker notes that this kind of data provision could benefit almost any type of business. According to InformationWeek:

"Microsensor technology is going to solve a lot of social problems that have been hard to address," says Stonebraker...

Read more: RFID Beyond the Supply Chain