[American_Liberty] Beyond the Bar Code
Michael J. Schneider
http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/mar01/schmidt.asp
Technology Review, March 2001
Beyond the Bar Code
By Charlie Schmidt
Within a few years, unobtrusive tags on retail products will send radio
signals to their manufacturers, collecting a wealth of information about
consumer habits-and also raising privacy concerns.
It's 2010, and an ordinary day on an assembly line. A bottle of root beer
gets stamped with an innocuous little tag that immediately begins sending
messages into cyberspace. The tag radios the soda company's Web site to
report the bottle's whereabouts, allowing computers to track the bottle as
it moves from the factory, through warehouses and distribution centers, and
into a refrigerator at a corner drugstore. When the bottle is sold, the
manufacturer is alerted and makes a new one to take its place. Finally,
facing reincarnation at a recycling plant, the bottle radios its "last
words" to a robotic separator that lifts it from a pile of plastic and
newspaper and tosses it into a container of broken glass.
Manufacturers hoping to recoup some of the billions lost every year to
theft, counterfeit, and depleted stocks have been closely watching a
technology that promises to track the locations of individual products, from
perfume bottles to car parts, in real time. At the heart of this scenario is
a little device called a "radio frequency identification tag"-a silicon chip
that boots up and transmits a signal when exposed to the energy field of a
nearby reader. The ultimate goal is to put a radio tag on virtually every
manufactured item, each tracked by a network of millions of readers in
factories, trucks, warehouses and homes, transforming huge supply chains
into intelligent, self-managing entities. Dick Cantwell, vice president of
global business management at Gillette says that the devices for reading the
tags are "going to be a ubiquitous part of construction, whether you're
building stores or homes....We see this as a tremendous opportunity and we
intend to make full use of the technology as it becomes available."
The radio tag has been around for more than half a century, largely
relegated to specialized industries. Some of its first uses were for
tracking livestock and government freight-train cargo; today highway tolls
throughout the United States and abroad are outfitted with readers that pick
up signals from a tag in your car as you drive by. Insiders in this field
believe the technology won't blanket the consumer market, though, until
someone produces a radio tag costing in the neighborhood of a penny-an
assumption that has sent engineers back to the drawing board.
When the penny barrier is finally broken, manufacturers hope to use these
tags as a next-generation bar code linking manufactured items to online
databases containing product-specific information. Steve Halliday, vice
president of technology at AIM, a trade association for manufacturers of
tagging technology, says, "If I talk to companies and ask them if they want
to replace the bar code with these tags, the answer can't be anything but
yes. It's like giving them the opportunity to rule the world."
Pennies or Less
Designed to speed up checkout counters and eliminate the drudgery of
physical price marking, the bar code has come a long way since 1974-when it
was introduced into retail sales on a pack of chewing gum in an Ohio
supermarket. Far exceeding initial expectations, five billion codes are
scanned every day in 140 countries. But even as retailers tip their hat to
the bar code's success, few deny that a more sophisticated kind of tagging
would be a great improvement. Bar codes identify only classes of products,
not individual items, whereas a digital numbering scheme built into a tag
has the capacity to identify every single manufactured item that is
currently made and sold. Bar codes also have to be deliberately scanned at
specific orientations; tags need only be within a reader's range. "Once the
infrastructure is in place, managing inventory in warehouses and retail
stores could become highly automated," says Alan Haberman, co-founder and
governor-at-large of the Uniform Code Council, the organization that
administers the bar code.
While attractive in concept, saturating the global supply chain with radio
tags and readers poses huge challenges-chief among them the cost of the tag,
typically more than a dollar. That's fine for a choice Hereford steer but
much too expensive for consumer items. The high cost results from the
silicon chip and from the antenna, a pricey metal coil that serves two
functions. First, it uses a magnetic field emitted by the reader to power
the chip. Then, when the chip is powered, the antenna transmits data from
the chip back to the reader. Most manufacturers of radio tags, including
Texas Instruments and Everett, WA-based Intermec, have developed tags based
on this model, which is known as "inductive coupling."
It is the cost of the inductively coupled tags, hovering around a dollar,
that lit a fire under Noel Eberhardt, vice president for advanced technology
at Motorola. "The words that burned in my ears were 'this is interesting
technology, but it's too expensive,'" Eberhardt says. "So I set out to build
the lowest-cost silicon chip possible. And my first objective was to get rid
of that coil."
In late 1995, Eberhardt started collaborating with Neil Gershenfeld,
director of the MIT Media Lab's Physics and Media Group, on a cost-effective
design. Eberhardt experimented with "capacitive coupling," an alternative
method in which the tag is powered not by magnetic forces but by
electrostatic charges emitted by the reader, charges similar to those that
cause your clothes to stick together when you pull them out of the dryer.
Using this mechanism, he found that coil antennas could be replaced with
conductive carbon ink printed on paper which would pick up the electrostatic
charges from the reader and create a current across the chip. The silicon
chip-itself less than three millimeters square-could be mounted atop a sheet
of paper lined with the special ink.
Without the metal coil, the cost of the tag dropped to less than 50 cents.
The added flexibility of the paper material also meant Eberhardt's prototype
tag could function when bent, cut or crumpled, as long as a remnant of the
carbon ink-based antenna remained connected to the chip. Eberhardt and
Gershenfeld announced their innovation in February 1999. Within weeks of the
announcement, Motorola released the first and so far the only capacitively
coupled tag.
Two Steps Forward
While Eberhardt's work moved the field closer to the penny tag, one
lingering issue is whether low-cost tags will have a long enough range to
make them practical. The range of Motorola's tag, for example, is limited to
slightly more than a centimeter. Painting the antenna over an entire box
extends the range to about 60 centimeters, but this won't help much on
something as small as a can of tuna fish. Higher-cost tags, like Intermec's
inductive tag, can transmit signals up to five meters but at a price beyond
the reach of the typical consumer market. Echoing industry sentiments,
Winston Guillory, vice president of the tag's business unit at Intermec,
predicts that short-term applications will probably be limited to warehouse,
rather than retail, management. And as for the penny tag, Guillory admits to
a certain skepticism. "You hear all this talk about it," he says. "But it's
never been delivered."
Despite the skepticism, many companies are in hot pursuit of the penny tag
and its glittering potential payoff. Steve Van Fleet, International Paper's
program manager for e-packaging, says the technology will benefit his
company's clients by eliminating the "shrinkage" due to lost, stolen or
spoiled goods that consumes three to five percent of everything they make.
Last year, International Paper partnered with Motorola to use their radio
tag on some of the 8.6 million metric tons of corrugated crates, boxes and
other packages the paper company makes annually. Explains Van Fleet, "Say I
have 5,000 cases on a truck that's supposed to be going to Cincinnati, but
the driver goes to St. Louis and diverts 1,000 cases to the black market.
Without the tags, we have limited visibility to detect this. But if we put
readers in the truck, I can inventory these cases remotely using geographic
information systems software on a laptop."
In addition to reducing shrinkage, such identification technology could help
companies create a more realistic picture of how their products move through
the supply chain and into the world. At Gillette, for example, sales
information is transferred across warehouses, distribution centers and
retail stores in batches by telephone, fax or e-mail. Since the information
isn't matched with demand in real time, manufacturers often get stuck making
too little, then too much, product in an attempt to keep up with the market.
Economists call this the "bullwhip effect."
Getting the cost of the radio tag down to a penny isn't the only major
technology challenge in this field. Another is linking the tags to the Web.
That effort is being led by an MIT-based consortium of academic and industry
partners called the Auto-ID Center. Kevin Ashton, the center's director,
anticipates the arrival of the penny tag in five years and says he is now
focusing, not on the tag, but on how to create a network architecture that
squeezes as much profit out of it as possible. "And profit," says Sanjay
Sarma, research director at the center, "will ultimately depend on a system
that allows for the seamless flow of data throughout the entire supply
chain."
The system will have to scale to unprecedented proportions, potentially
handling trillions of items annually, making it one of the largest systems
ever built. "It's an enormous undertaking," Ashton concedes. The Auto-ID
Center, formed in 1999, with 11 corporate members including Gillette,
Procter & Gamble, International Paper, Sun Microsystems and the Uniform Code
Council, is simplifying the task by hooking on to an existing system: the
Internet. "Initially, it was expected that tags would need quite a lot of
memory," recalls Ashton. But Sarma, along with Sunny Siu and Auto-ID Center
co-director David Brock, designed a cost-saving system that makes tags
extremely simple and transfers all the information about a product to the
Web-a description of its constituent parts, for example, or a record of its
trajectory through the supply chain. The only information actually on the
tag is an Auto-ID Center invention called the "Electronic Product Code," a
counterpart of the bar code that assigns a searchable number to each object
(see companion article, "What's My Number?").
Getting Personal
According to Cantwell, Gillette and many other companies envision using tags
to download promotional material to displays mounted on store shelves, or
even to shoppers' handheld computers. By simply scanning a product in front
of a networked reader linked to a computer monitor, customers could one day
retrieve user instructions, specifications and other product information to
help them decide, for instance, which toothbrush is more flexible or which
soup has less sodium.
Talk to Cantwell awhile longer, and he's likely to bring up Gillette's next
goal: using readers to track consumer use of its products at home. Gillette
sees the technology engaged in direct consumer marketing, which would rely
on personalized information obtained from readers installed where products
are actually used-in your refrigerator, say. While this scenario may be
decades away, the coming era of ubiquitous computing could bring Internet
access to every household appliance. "Smart" fridges could monitor tagged
products, learn your food preferences and shopping schedule, and then buy
all your groceries for you. And, if you let them, companies like Gillette
will monitor personal use of their products. Throw one of their razors into
the trash, and another one would be on its way.
------ http://USFamily.Net/info - Unlimited Internet - From $8.99/mo! ------
--
"Evolution beyond the moral and intellectual fraud of politics."
You *will* read the entire website, in order to understand the
group's primary purpose and topic focus, *before* contibuting:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/American_Liberty/files/al.htm
To post, email American...@yahoogroups.com or visit site.
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/