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One thing that RFID can do is track the serial numbers of various products packed inside another container. And do it automatically without someone having to look around the container to find it. You can also, with multiple readers, triangulate a position and find out where it is in your warehouse. IMO, the people jumping in on the ground floor will get very little return for their money in the early stages (unless they have a valid in-house use for it). But it wouldn't surprise me if it becomes the norm, and then everyone will find it invaluable. -dan
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RFID
We had a recent thread on RFID from a Joel article that also had some interesting opinions. You might want to check out that thread. rd
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Tom, Here's my $.02 on this subject... Currently the "push" for RFID is at the pallet level. It's a great tool to track, move and receive pallets of goods. However, I do NOT think that RFID will make a big hit at the unit level. Why? Because consumer outcry will quash it the same way genetically altered crops have been quashed. If you've ever seen the movie "Minority Report" where Tom Cruise walks around and is recognized by billboards and retail stores that's where RFID will lead us. Imagine, if you will, a thief with a high powered scanner driving by your house to notice that you have a 52" plasma TV, a Dell PC and 5 iPods. You'd make a good target. Also, imagine being able to track your teenage daughter anywhere she goes because she has RFIDs woven into the fabric of her clothes and as she walks by publicly installed RFID readers all over town, one on every stop sign and stop light. Or, worse yet, imagine your daughter's stalker tracking her everywhere she goes. I know there's a tool to turn off the RFID once you leave the retail store. But will the public trust that it has happened? What if the tool is faulty? While the second scenario is a little far fetched (is it really? maybe not) you can BET that the opponents to RFID will have such examples plastered all over those posters for an election proposition banning RFID if unit level RFID gets momentum. In fact, I'd gladly sign a petition to put such a proposition on the ballot! chuck Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer. "Tom Daly"Comment
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I haven't got around to it but have been wondering what you all, both as IT people and as average citizens, think about the push for RFID. I'm not completely decided on it. But it seems an expensive undertaking to make this change to do what barcodes already do. Is there really a need to track every item from the factory, to the shippers, to the retailer, to the "comsumer", to their house, and all the way to the town dump? Seems like overkill, but I haven't made up my mind. What do you guys/gals think?Comment
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Although the point remains the same, id'ing in Minority Report was done by retina scan, the same technique suggested for biometric identification from processing arrivals to the country to arrivals at a company's building to proposed processing as login. It is not much of a stretch to figure that those face recognition cameras we've seen used already will be optimized with a retina scanning laser beam recon'ing the camera covered area in Version 1984. At that point Minority Report's science fiction becomes reality. The RFID's still working in products after purchase don't identify the person who bought the product and is wearing or carrying it, at least not the common passive RFID's. The more expensive battery backed RFID's proposed for fail safe scanning and recording of information about the product could very well be updated with purchaser during checkout and display that information to a scanner. I would expect some sort of password requirement at that level to enable access to the data however. More likely to occur with more frequency will be devices that transmit GPS locations attached to a person's car by a stalker such as the recent case of a man stalking an ex-girlfriend. He was convicted and is now wearing the same device attached to him, monitored by law enforcement. How fitting. I advocate some solutions along those lines in the final chapter of my book, Murder on a Horse Trail: The Disappearance of Chandra Levy. rdComment
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