Providing several real-world examples of RFID-enabled business practices and the power of RFID, sensors and other locationing technologies, Amy Rogers Nazarov has written an article titled "The Internet of Things" for Internet Evolution - a CMP Technology publication and sister site of InformationWeek.  This article describes the many benefits provided by RFID across a variety of applications, along with several realistic challenges and cautions regarding issues such as privacy and data collection. 

ThingMagic is proud to have several customer deployments cited in this article: Tomorrow's Mother (now TM Apparel) is using RFID to improve visibility into its supply chain, Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center has deployed both active and UHF passive RFID for patient and high-value asset tracking, and Ford Motor Company's work with ThingMagic and tool maker DeWALT to develop Tool Link - an RFID-enabled tool tracking solution available to the consumer market today.

A key thread throughout this article is the importance of data sharing and intelligence generation.  Each RFID deployment has its own network requirements and information sharing opportunities, making it critical for users to identify the business process improvements they are targeting.  Managing an inventory of maternity clothing, prepping patients for surgery and locating a missing tool may seem very different on the surface, but applying RFID to each of these activities can result in significant productivity benefits if approached with the right planning and thoughtful decisions on how to best leverage the resulting data.

This article has also been published as a special 16-page handbook insert in the print issue of InformationWeek.  Case studies on the ThingMagic customers referenced in the article are available on our Case Studies web page.

Bruce Sterling’s book “Shaping Things” Shaping Things contemplates a future in which all objects produced in our society have microhistories that can be traced.

This is a very broad and exciting vision, and an important one if we are to become a truly sustainable society. Carlo Ratti and his team at MIT have begun to look at the microhistories at the end of the supply chain by tracking trash with a wireless, battery-powered object that reports GPS coordinates over time as it moves along with the trash. At ThingMagic, we believe that once RFID tags are economically feasible enough to add to all of our disposable products, and with RFID readers in trucks and other points in the garbage collection supply chain, we can truly start to track all objects through this part of the industrial cycle. If the product can be identified and all of its material contents known, it will allow us to have some inputs into knowing where high quality materials can be harvested in a closed-loop industrial cycle. Perhaps more importantly, consumers will be able to finally see the end of life of their consumer goods, understand their impact on our planet, and for the non-biological materials, hopefully see them cycled back into a new product, rather than lost, locked into the earth as refuse.

Smart products fuse together electronics, software, sensors and network connections to provide a wide range of new capabilities. Smart objects can:

• Measure, sense, see and report on their surroundings
• Respond to changes in their environment
• Interact with other smart objects, people, and IT systems in entirely new ways
• Adapt to the unique needs of businesses and people

From trucks that can track what’s in them to critical care medical devices that know exactly where they are in crowded hospitals, smart objects are changing how we build and use products.

Microsoft, IBM and Google all recognize the growing role smart objects are playing in our lives. Microsoft’s Vision for 2019 video shows a world of flexible displays, touch screens and seamless data integration across smart objects that recognize and respond to one another and to the world around them.

Google talks about the Next Internet being a place where connected smart objects constantly exchange information and adjust and act based on the needs of the user.

IBM’s view is "The planet will be instrumented, interconnected, intelligent."

Many smart objects of the near future will comprise one or more wireless technologies to connect their state to the internet. At ThingMagic, we believe that ultimately, passive and semi-passive RFID will define the largest segment of this -- because these radios do not require batteries or can parasitically draw power from their environment -- all objects which do not have sources of power (the majority of objects humans create) have the potential to be tagged.

We are inventing and producing technology that helps give smart objects their intelligence. Our RFID readers, for example, act analogously to a WiFi router for laptops and smartphones, by connecting objects to the network and provide the ability to identify and track assets. And, in our labs, we are working on sensor technologies that will give objects the ability to analyze and respond to their environment without human intervention.

Smart objects can change the world for the better. Focusing of our food supply for a moment, think of the truck that knows when spinach has been contaminated by E. coli even before it arrives at the next distribution point. In the home, people have spoken for many years about the milk telling your fridge to re-order itself due to spoilage or short supply. We are finally at a cusp in time where this could be possible AND economically feasible.

It is an exciting vision. And a vision that we are proud and excited to be part of.

Wired recently asked their readers what accessories they would like to see added to the iPhone 3.0, which is expected to be released this summer.

As noted in Wired.com Readers' Best iPhone Dongleware Inventions, adding an embedded RFID reader was one of the top requested new features. The RFID applications the readers were interested in are payments and information access.

The iPhone RFID reader would be used scan products or objects containing RFID tags. The iPhone would then connect to the Internet to complete a transaction or find out more information.

Wired readers tend to be techies. But it is still interesting that awareness of RFID has reached the point that they see value in adding RFID to a consumer device -- interest in connecting the physical world to the digital world.

When this does happen, with millions of devices interacting with billions of objects, we can then start to create Reality Search Engines.

Other suggested accessories include Bluetooth stereo headphones, an external keyboard and automotive diagnostic tool.

For an example of RFID working with the iPhone, view this video from Touch - a research group exploring the way mobile phones communicate with the physical world.

At the recent New York Auto Show, Ford revealed an RFID-enabled concept van for consumers called the Transit Connect Family One Concept.

Based on the existing Transit Connect work van, the Transit Connect Family One is a forward-looking concept vehicle that combines high-tech and high-touch amenities to keep a youthful family connected, engaged and entertained.

The Transit Connect work van is a big hit in Europe, where it has been on sale for several years. Despite its small size, the Transit Connect has a large and flexibility cargo space. It also is fuel efficient, delivering 24 mpg. This makes it ideal for a wide variety of business hauling needs. The Transit Connect work van will go on sale in the U.S. this summer.

The Transit Connect work van will offer the RFID-based asset tracking system Ford Tool Link by DeWALT as a factory installed option. ThingMagic worked with Ford and DeWALT to design and develop Tool Link and the system uses ThingMagic UHF RFID readers. In addition to Transit Connect, Tool Link is available as a factory installed option on 2009 Ford F-150 pickup trucks.

While the Transit Connect Family One is a concept car and may or may not come to market, it is interesting to see Ford thinking about adding RFID to consumer vehicles. This is another example of RFID technology moving beyond industrial applications and entering consumer markets.

The Christian Science Monitor has a great article on networked outdoor sensors. The article focuses on the use of sensors to measure soil moisture levels at Camalie Vineyards in California.

As the article points out, wireless sensors are increasingly being used outdoors. Common applications include keeping track of temperatures, moisture levels and other environmental factors for a variety of high value crops including fruits, nuts and nursery plants.

Addressing similar market needs, ThingMagic builds rugged RFID readers designed for use in harsh environments. Our readers are being used to monitor the moisture content in bales of hay, keep track of cars and trucks in maintenance yards, track tools at work sites, monitor temperatures in fresh produce cold chains and a wide variety of other outdoor applications.

Passive RFID is well suited for these applications: passive RFID tags are inexpensive to buy, encode and deploy; they also do not require their own source of power; RFID readers come in a variety of economical form factors, including handheld and mobile versions. This combination makes it easy to deploy the system in almost any outdoor situation.

RFID readers are also designed to be network ready and fit into existing IT infrastructures, or simply move the sensor data to PCs or Internet applications.

ThingMagic has an active sensor R&D program and is working with several partners on commercial sensor products. More on this in coming months.

IBM's new Building a Smarter Planet blog has an interesting video describing how interconnected intelligent systems are being used to build a smarter planet.

IBM is defining the smarter planet as "intelligent infrastructure for our energy grids, transportation system, food supply and healthcare networks... It is also about trillions of devices and objects connecting to the Internet and changing the way billions of people live and work.'

The video describes how RFID will be used across the food chain to insure safety and reduce waste and loss.

Today, ThingMagic and several of our business partners are working on making our global food chain more secure, safe and efficient.

One example is the cold chain, where our USB Reader is being used to read temperature sensors made by Infratab Corporation. The combination of Infratab sensors and ThingMagic readers provide producers of perishable foods and products information and insights on the quality of their cold chains.

Infratab is offering a cold chain starter kit – including the ThingMagic USB Reader - now through March.

The business of finding digital data is booming. Most of us type search terms into a 2-inch wide box several tens or hundreds of times a day to look for contacts, addresses, directions, documents, scholarly articles, and patents. This type of search has a two distinguishing characteristics. First, the data being searched has typically been digitized at some time in the past. Second, the data usually refers to digital objects or physical objects which are spatially distant from us - e.g., books in a Glenrothes, Scotland fulfillment center, a picture of the Great Wall of China, or the topology of the surface of Mars. What these search boxes don't yet do is search the space around us in real-time - the here and now. Enter Reality Search Engines.

One can imagine the space around us to be divided into a few distinct zones.

• Manipulatory space, where we are are focused on objects close at hand - a supermarket aisle, for example.
• Ambulatory space, where we need to walk around to find things - a hospital floor or an office building
• Vista space, which is as far as the eye can see - a parking lot at a stadium, perhaps.

Enabling search in these spaces requires tagging physical objects and enabling computers to "see" them in real time. We have worked on several interesting examples of such search engines. Mediacart, one of our customers, has RFID-enabled shopping carts that search in manipulatory space. Tool Link, by Ford and DeWalt, enables contractors to query the ambulatory space in their vehicles in real-time and answer the question: do I have all the tools I need with me right now? Other customers are successfully locating cars in parking lots using passive RFID tags and readers from ThingMagic.

Passive RFID systems enable computers to "see" hundreds of objects per second from millimeters to tens of meters with near-zero error rates. This range goes up to over a hundred meters with battery assisted passive tags. Several different form factors enable real-time, ultra-local search on demand.

For more details, please take a look the presentation below. This Tech Talk was given at Google's Cambridge offices earlier this year. For best results, please view the presentation in full-screen mode at the slideshare site.

Ravi Pappu Google Tech Talk 2008

Frankly, we're disappointed. It's 2008, the veritable future, and you still don't have an RFID-based automatic sliding doggie door? For shame! The Plexidor Electronic Doggie Door allows for all that nice canine coming and going with none of the less-nice house robbing a regular flap door enables. Your dog gets to wear an RFID chip on his collar, which lets the door know to automatically slide up when he shows up -- hopefully with a sort of squeegee sound to complete the sci-fi effect. Prices range from $700 to $800 depending on configuration.

by Paul Miller, Engadget

RFID is most associated with supply chain applications and item level tagging. But over the last couple of years many other applications for RFID have emerged. One area that is getting an increasing amount of attention is using RFID in document management. In many industries, the value of a printed document can be substantially higher than an equivalent weight of currency. Critical media, legal or financial documents can be embedded with an RFID tag so the document can be located and tracked. It allows these documents to inherit a digital identity and gives computers the ability to search for and locate documents as easy as clicking the search button on an Internet search page.

It also increases information security. Important documents such as earnings releases, merger and acquisition memos, health records and legal documents can be linked to specific people or locations, and un-authorized document movement can be identified. Wouldn’t it be nice if an earnings report could message the CFO that it had left their office?

Two events at the recent RFID Live conference highlight the growth of RFID in document management. Lexmark announced a new RFID enabled printer drawer option for their T60, T642 and T644 laser printers. These are regular laser printers that can be equipped with a special drawer that contains a ThingMagic M5e embedded RFID reader. This allows the laser printer to print documents and other media and encode attached RFID tags.

Also at the show, Dan Zinn, Chief Information Officer of the Florida State Attorney’s office, presented on using RFID to manage case files and documents. The Florida Attorney’s office manages thousands of document case files. Using ThingMagic RFID readers as part of system designed with the help of our business partner Innerwireless, they’ve been able to make tracking and locating case files much more efficient.

We expect to see many more examples of RFID being used to track, locate and secure documents in the coming months.