A piece in the RFID Journal by Florian Michahelles and Elgar Fleisch hints at the concept of an internet of things - where we navigate our real world with access to as much content (and apps) as we have in our virtual one. All the RFID makers need to do is overcome a few standards and include the rest us:
As RFID becomes ubiquitous in various industries, the efficiencies it brings to supply chains will extend to other business processes. But companies will not be able to unleash RFID’s myriad benefits if the technology continues to exclude consumers. At the same time, if consumers could experience immediate benefits from RFID, it would lower or even dissolve their resistance to the technology.
One foreseeable way to invite consumers into the world of RFID is to give them access to the Internet of Things, so they could easily get information about RFID-tagged products and related services. We have the architecture for the EPCglobal Network—the infrastructure that allows companies to track goods in the global supply chain and find information about products associated with Electronic Product Codes. The missing link is how to put this in the hands of consumers.
At the St. Gallen/ETH Zurich Auto-ID Lab, we believe that mobile phones enabled with near-field communications (NFC) technology could be one answer. The Near Field Communication (NFC) Forum, established in 2004 by Nokia, Philips and Sony, includes providers of payment systems, smart-card developers and other mobile handset manufacturers. Their goal is to develop secure and easy-to-use connections among consumer electronics devices mainly for payment, ticketing and service-initiation applications.
RFID Journal - - RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Technology News & Features
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The book Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling is a great read if you’re interested in trying to visualize how the future will look with respect to RFID and an “internet of things” (he calls it “spime” which i think is an awful word, but at least the concept is there). He also goes does some nice explaining of how the connection between things, people, and information has changed over time — laying some good groundwork for understanding how those connections might work in the future.
November 5th, 2007 at 9:36 pm