"The Internet of Things"
Well before the Internet became a fixture of modern-day life, a new technology called the Universal Product Code (UPC) revolutionized daily commerce. The UPC bar code was first printed on industrial packaging and then onto just about everything that needed to be identified and tracked. The UPC led to many innovations. Large superstores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot wouldn't exist without UPC technology. Other innovative uses of the UPC include Medicine where bar codes are used to track patients and medications in a hospital avoiding mistakes that could be a matter of life or death.
For all the remarkable improvements in identification and tracking that the UPC has brought forth to date, a new Automatic Identification(Auto ID) technology call RFID, when coupled with the wireless Internet will far surpass it. The implications of RFID technology replacing or augmenting UPC will usher in a sea change in the way we market, sell, and consume products and services. Assuming that privacy and cost issues can be resolved, RFID we will be our entrée to the age of what one person called the "Internet of Things." In other words real world objects from coffee cups to greetings cards will be seamlessly interconnected to our social networks just as personal computers and smartphones are today.
RFID Briefly Defined
Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a general term that is used to describe a system that transmits the identity (in the form of a unique serial number) of an object wirelessly, using radio waves. RFID are broadly classified as active and passive. The active ones contain a battery on the tag while the passive tags do not and instead use the electromagnetic wave from the RFID reader to wirelessly "reflect" their ID number. An example of the passive type is the subcutaneous "chip" under my dog's skin that displays his serial number when the vet passes an RFID reader over his back. There is a laundry list of other RFID uses including:
- Passports
- Product tracking
- Transportation and logistics
- Lap scoring
- Animal identification
- Inventory systems
- Human implants
Picture of an RFID tag used by Wal-Mart for supply chain tracking.
An example of how RFID can be used at the grocery store was first presented in a clever IBM commercial.
Consumer Applications
A far more intriguing application of RFID technology in the consumer space is a product now marketed by a French company Violet.net. The company's motto is "Let All Things Be Connected". Briefly stated, in their words, "Violet was inspired by a simple fact: the rift between the virtual world - everything happening on the other side of your computer screen - and the physical world we live in is growing, and growing fast. Violet thus envisions a space in which most of the objects surrounding us would be: endowed with intelligence; able to react or interact with us; and, most importantly, be connected to the network." Thus was born the Violet Mirror -- a device that can be connected to any personal computer over USB and can read RFID tagged items and trigger pre-assigned actions on your PC or social network.
Violet Video
Game Changing RFID
RFID in short is the game changing technology with a not-so-difficult implementation that when connected to the wireless Internet promises revolutionary results in how people will interact with each other and between the real and virtual world.
References and links:
1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rfid
2.http://www.tutorial-reports.com/wireless/rfid/standards.php
3. http://www.violet.net/
