Farewell Charlie Walton

Charlie Walton was a true pioneer of RFID - he has just passed away aged 89. One of his first inventions was an RFID- based door unlocking  device - and this is probably still the most familiar application for most people.
More at :http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/27/charlie-walton-inventor-of-rfid-passes-away-at-89/. One interesting of his life is that he was very much an "inventor", and this is certainly something that inspires young people, perhaps more than ISO standards or ROI.

Friday afternoon apps for RFID

Great one this - for $200 (US) have a permanent reminder your dearly departed for the mobile-phone using generation http://www.personalrosettastone.com/faq.html .No word on upgrades should formats change.
 If drowning your sorrows (see above) why not visit  the cheeky pub in Georgia USA - self service thanks to RFID ...
Still awainting results of NFC payment trials and no definitive news as to whether Apple will support NFC in Iphone 5.

Birds and bees

Birds being frozen chickens which you could buy via the new GOOGLE android NFC electronic wallet.
 Techy details here - http://developer.android.com/reference/android/nfc/package-summary.html
Bees - 13.56 MHz RFID tag equipped  bees (

Pahl M, Zhu H, Tautz J, Zhang S, 2011 Large Scale Homing in Honeybees. PLoS ONE 6(5): e19669. )

 

NFC and Google

the NFC forum have produced a report http://www.nfc-forum.org/resources/white_papers/NFC_Smart_Posters_White_Paper.pdf on deploying NFC to make a sort of minority report-lite  environment. the Register is still skeptical but Google seems to be investing heavily in this area. Killer application still seems a way away but I don't seem able to get my phone to read QR tags so who knows !

More on RFID in fiction

RFID is becoming the deus -ex machina of choice for many TV shows - Hawaii 5-0 had  a storyline where the baddies were triathletes, and our heros were tracking them via the championchip device  complete with bleeping point on electronic map. However the dastards had swapped them and so there was more running etc. until good triumphed. Whether this increases or decreases RFID acceptability remains to be seen

some videos from the BBC

One about payments via NFC , the other about couterfeit goods tracing (or in fact legitimate goods tracing)

extreme RFID

Interesting paper from Chris Paget (http://www.tombom.co.uk/extreme_rfid.pdf) about accessing epc gen2 tags from very long ranges (100's of metres) using equipment built for less than $1000. Basically he increases the range by increasing the power of the transmitter and using a more directional antenna, thus increasing the power density in the region of the tag. You do need a ham radio operators licence to broadcast at these powers though...
This is really not new - physics is physics but the "loophole" of the ham radio licence is new.
Aside from the fact that you could use this approach to pick up Bin Ladins underpants assuming they are tagged, this may open the way to other applications - eg a foursquare-like (http://foursquare.com/) scanning RFID reader that you could install in particular locations, or long-range tracking in warehouses, assuming safety - he is using 70watts output - and regulatory compliance