…and “little brother” takes RFID in hand before Big Brother has the chance.

Making the Jump to Gen 2

Last year’s holiday gift to the supply chain was RFID Gen 2 from nonprofit EPCglobal Inc. A 15-member standards board — based on consensus from more than 60 tech companies and government agencies — approved the royalty-free EPCglobal UHD Generation 2 specification. Heralded as the first UHF RFID open architecture designed by a committee, Gen 2 advantages are said to include global interoperability, international vendor support, multiple read and write capabilities that could deliver a faster ROI, and more than double the communication speeds of Gen 1 tags.

In that article, it was expected that many companies were then preparing for product releases in the first half of this year, and that expectation has already come true in a big way.

According to this article, Texas Instrument’s Educational and Productivity Solutions (EP&S) business group announced yesterday that it has become the first Wal-Mart supplier to ship the retailer cases and pallets affixed with the Gen 2 tags — completely bypassing previous generations of the tag. TI will ship a dozen calculator SKUs from their Alliance, Texas facility to five Wal-Mart distribution centers in Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas. The new Gen 2 system ties into Oracle’s ERP planning platform and data warehouse.

TI budgeted less than $500,000 for initial investments in hardware, software, consulting, integration and tags — and came in below budget on the project. A 2- to 3-year ROI is expected.

Interesting, the quantity of data that will be generated by the implementation is not clear, but TI will begin collecting the data by the end of this month — and expects to use 250,000 RFID tags in 2006.

Tags will remain at the case and pallet levels for now, though TI expects to eventually embed the tags to deter theft. Beyond that, the plan also extends beyond the supply chain to monitor environmental disposal.

A Song in His Heart, and an RFID Tag In His Hand

In more personal news, a UNIX engineer — along with the help of a physician friend — has had a basic RFID tag — in the form of a glass ampoule — implanted in his hand. (Here, I thought that I needed a new hobby. I suppose not.) According to this article, Mikey Sklar formerly opposed the use of RFID technology but, as an electronic clothing and gadgets designer, caught the bug to use himself as a test subject for the beginnings of what might be possible with the implanted technology.

“Sklar said he chose a read-only device that serves as an identifier. Using a microcontroller, open source tools and a circuit board, he wrote a program to pull down Internet content – email [sic.], RSS feeds, favorite Web sites – and send them via Bluetooth to a small display chandelier, which will light up in his apartment, like a miniature version of Times Square’s electronic tickers.” He’ll be able to access Internet content about 30-feet away from his laptop ‘without being chained to the computer, though it’ll probably be kind of aggravating.’” But all is fair in UNIX and RFID as he added, “I’ve always been a gadget person.”

Trossen Innovations sold the Phidget tag and reader to Sklar. Founder and CEO Matt Trossen said during an interview with Information Week, “‘They’re sold as livestock tags, but we sell to students and hobbyists using RFID kits for school projects, home projects, to let people experiment,’ Trossen said. ‘We don’t store them in a sterile environment. There’s a whole underground of body modifiers out there that are having fun, curious about technology, tattooing, piercing and putting things under their skin. It seems like RFID technology is appealing to them as well.”

Want your very own RFID implant? Check out Trossen’s Phidgets website and go to RFID Products. (Of course, these products are NOT approved for use in humans. So you’re on your own.)