Interesting article posted today on appleinsider.com pointing out that Apple has filed a patent on using a RFID reader in a touchscreen device. However it doesn’t guarantee that you will see a RFID reader in a consumer’s iphone.
There are other reasons why apple might have filed the patent. The most obvious one for me is to exploited the business need for mobile devices.
As I have said in the past once I see cool apps using NFC in mobiles phones I will start believing the rumors about RFID in Iphone.
GlobeRanger has filed a lawsuit against Software AG for stealing its intellectual property(IP). GlobeRanger alleges that Software AG with two consultancies stole its IP and also illegally obtained a RFID contract with the US navy.
Part of the allegations is that one of the consultants was sleeping with a US navy employee responsible for the procurement of RFID systems.
Apple made the right decision about not putting a NFC reader in the IPAD2. At the moment there are no killer apps that would excite potential IPAD buyers.
Apple has been hiring a lot of NFC experts and hopefully they are working on both hardware and cool NFC applications. If they can create some cool apps we may see NFC in the Iphone5 or the IPAD3.
The Standard Chartered Bank is using RFID to improve customer service to it’s high value customers.
Each high value customer will be issued a RFID tag. When the customer enters the store the tag will be scanned. The tag scan will alert the branch manager to greet the customer. Stopping them from having to queue up.
A jail in Australia has stopped using RFID to track inmates due to battery issues. Every time a battery failed it sent an alarm. Staffs were being overwhelmed by the number of alarms.
Over the past year we have seen a number of RFID installations in jails/prisons that have failed to drive the expected business benefits. All the failed projects have focused on inmate tracking and knowing where the offender was at all time. The average cost of a RFID implementation is running at around 2.5 million dollars per 10,000 beds.
Jails are tricky environments to install and use RFID, as the majority of jails are big concrete and steel buildings. The other big issue is that offenders do not want to be tracked and have lots of time to think about how to bypass the RFID system.
A global implementation of RFID across a jail may not be the best value for money at this time. I suspect that we will see a more targeted approach to RFID being implemented where the RFID is applied across a smaller number of inmates for a specific purpose.
A number of organizations have branded together to develop guidelines for the implementation of item level RFID in retail. Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Solutions (VICS) and standards groups GS1 US and GS1 Canada are some of the associations involved.
 Hopefully guidelines will address the numerous privacy issues associated with deploying RFID at the item level.
The cult of Mac is reporting a rumor that Apple will be including a NFC (Near Field Communication) chip in version 5 of the Iphone. Apparently Apple has hired a number of NFC experts and has filed a number of patents.
There have been a lot of rumors about the Iphone of which a small minority have turned about to be true. However we know that Nokia has committed to this technology for all of its smartphones from 2011.
So we now have two key players who seem to be interested in NFC who own around 40% of the market for smartphones. RIM has also experimented with NFC and had a pilot project with Paypass last year.
I’m still waiting to see a killer application for NFC enabled smart phones until I see it I’m going to assume that all talk about NFC enables smartphones is vaporware.
We have just found out about another backfiring marketing stunt, this time it was Uniliver in Brazil. What they did was plant GPS trackers in boxes of detergents and then they were following the purchasers to their home address and giving out prizes. The purchasers didn’t know about the GPS trackers or the prizes when the purchased the product. We have seen this happen time and again with other companies and one of the golden rules for GPS and RFID is that no matter what the benefit to the consumer, there must always be informed consent.
