(Presentation by Dr Patrick Dixon at national UK conference on RFID use - January 2004 - see also RFID slides) Get ready for the biggest manufacturing, distribution and retail revolution since the net. The next ten years will see a new techno-revolution which will allow total automation from manufacturing to point of purchase, using wireless technology to create "radio barcodes".
A world, where everything that moves can talk to everyone, everywhere all the time. That means cartons of milk, bottles of wine, clothes, wallets, tyres, cars, pets and people.
Radio bar-codes embedded into billions of different things and organisms which have value, including animals and possibly some human beings - sending out radio signals about what they are, where they are, and possibly what they are doing or how their bodies are working. Like mobile phones, they cannot communicate to each other direct, but can exchange information via send / receive base stations.
These devices are tiny micro-computer systems which already cost as little as 25 cents, expected to fall to less than 5 cents by 2005. They are going to change all our lives, containing hardware, software, and permanent memory stores. They transmit and receive data and have their own built-in power generators which could in theory last up to 100 years. Activated by a high-intensity burst of electromagnetic radiation from a distance of less than two metres, the devices respond with short bursts of data.
So-called Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFID) are already being introduced rapidly by chains such as Wal-Mart for larger consignments. RFIDs have been around a long time. Since 1997 you'll have found the same technology in Ski passes in Switzerland , in Swatch watches, some of which can store credit, as well as more recently in London Underground electronic tickets.
Within the current decade, more of these RFIDs will be made each year than there are people alive on earth. Once prices fall to less than 2 cents per tag, retail usage will explode with anything from 20 - 40 billion tagged products sold a year.
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