Saturday, February 23, 2008

RFID the next frontier.

There is an exiting experiment by the University of Washington's computer science department. Volunteer students and faculty are using RFID to track themselves and their personal belongings within the computer science research building. Location data is used to help people find each other, locate lost items, and track how time is spent. With the speed of life in the developed world, I dare say that this team is going to come out with a breakthrough for the next trend of RFID in a B2C model

This gives the other side of RFID that has been received with mixed feelings in the western world due to the first models of its deployment not being in tandem with the citizen's need for privacy.

AeroScout this also released a temperature monitoring solution for the health care industry, which can alert hospital staff of threatening temperature fluctuations on tagged health care items and products.

This is where ingenuity is taking us in the RFID field.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Bridging the Digital Divide

I just had a long conversation with one of my students on the the bus from campus last week, talking about the Mobile Phone as the de-facto bridge for the digital divide and NOT the PC. In this very timely article, Mark Dean in the San Jose Mercury News clearly explains that the age of the PC is "drawing to a close". He says that "connectivity trumps processing power in this new era," an idea that has been the heart of many of our recent conversations in the Mobile Consumer Lab.