SCDigest
Editorial Staff
| SCDigest Says: |
 The general opinion now is that the Internet of Things should include a lot more than RFID – for example, other data collection technologies and connectivity options (e.g., your refrigerator connected to the internet, whether it uses RFID or not).
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These are some of the news highlights over the past few weeks in RFID.
US Government Blesses Patent Pool: The US Department of Justice issued a favorable preliminary opinion on the so-called RFID “patent pool,” a large group of RFID technology companies gathered under an umbrella organization called the RFID Consortium. Members have agreed to a framework for licensing RFID patents. (See RFID Patent Pool, Take 2.) The DOJ looked at whether there were anti-trust issues with the Consortium, but found any such issues were minor compared to the potential of the arrangement to speed RFID technology adoption.
The upshot for users: the potential for the Consortium to speed technology development remains in place, and users have little to fear these days from getting embroiled in patent disputes between vendors.
Europe Commission Debates the “Internet of Things:" We’re not sure where it really came from, but SCDigest first heard the term “Internet of Things” from internet luminary Esther Dyson around the time of the launch of the EPCGlobal organization at a conference in Chicago in 2003. Dyson had written an article using that term shortly before that conference, and was the keynote speaker there. (See Internet Maven Esther Dyson's Unique Take on RFID.)
At that first EPC Global conference, Dyson said "The promise of RFID is to make each item individually visible to readers that scan them, and to build and make use of an IT infrastructure behind them. If you build those investment-returning systems with some basic object identification standards in place, you get persistent identity of all these objects (almost) for free."
Now, a group called CASAGRAS (Coordination and Support Action for Global RFID-related Activities and Standardization), which has received funding from the European Union to look at RFID and the Internet of Things potential, is debating what the term should really mean. The general opinion now is that it should include a lot more than RFID – for example, other data collection technologies and connectivity options (e.g., your refrigerator connected to the internet, whether it uses RFID or not).
We will report on the group’s preliminary report in more detail next week.
(RFID and Automatic Identification Article - Continued Below)
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