The commercial revolution triggered by electronic tags

Do you believe? In Singapore, cars on the street can “talk” with the streets; in the northeastern city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, supermarket retailers are testing a new computer system through which customers purchase goods. In the meantime, you can let the product automatically “notify” the store of the sale of the product; and about 10 years later, the frozen food may be able to automatically “tell” the microwave oven how to cook itself...

Just as the revolutionary changes brought about by the Internet have brought together people from different corners of the world, the new technologies discussed in this article will also bring about another revolutionary change. Everything in the world will be linked through this technology, and Can "talk" to each other! And this huge change is happening quietly. At present, large companies such as Wal-Mart, Gillette and P&G have united to allow this technology to flourish.

Magical "electronic label"

According to "USA Today", different from the Internet, this time of technological change does not require more powerful computers and faster Internet connection speeds. On the contrary, it only requires a piece of stamp-sized plastic, worth a few cents or less. Each such plastic piece will have a small computer chip embedded in it, and some data will be stored on it. Through a tiny antenna on a plastic sheet, the chip can exchange information with the network system.

In the near future, when billions of such plastic labels are attached to different objects and they can communicate with each other, this technology will permeate every corner of business and our daily life, not just Confined to the network formed by today's personal computers, mobile phones, or e-mail. By then, you will find such a label on each item.

For example, the label on the supermarket item tells the store what to buy, which has passed the shelf life, and when the customer pays, the cashier's reader can read the above content in just one second; when you have a cold When you accidentally take the wrong medicine bottle and you are ready to swallow the pill, the label on the medicine bottle will promptly warn you to take the wrong medicine.

Lowering production costs is the key

In fact, the new "electronic label" is not a new thing that has only appeared in the last year or two. As early as during the Second World War, the military used this technique to separate the enemy from his own. Since the 1970s, the U.S. federal government has begun to affix such tags on nuclear materials in order to track their whereabouts. In the 1980s, warehouses of some commercial companies began to use it to determine the location of containers.

In the recent past, RFID is increasingly appearing in places that Americans are familiar with. For example, the Exxon Mobil Oil & Gas Company's Speedpass fuel card and the US wireless tollgate E-ZPass system all use RFID.

Singapore uses RFID to control traffic conditions. The system, called "Electronic Road Pricing" (ERP for short), can be charged according to different standards on different road sections and times. For example, from 8:30 am to 9:00 am, the main road charges $1.6, but it is free from 2:00 pm to 5:30 pm, which helps relieve traffic congestion.

But so far, electronic labels are very expensive except for certain specific uses such as E-ZPass and Singapore's ERP. The cost of a label is about $1, so if you stick it to a product worth only a few dollars too much Not worth it.

However, a small private company in California, Alien Technology, currently claims that they have mastered a method for producing electronic tags in large quantities at low cost. According to Jeffrey Gacobson, the company's chief executive, they will receive an order for 500 million electronic tags later this year, which costs only 7 cents each. He said with pride that the 500 million e-tags alone are more than all the RFIDs in history.

Glasses can't find electronic tags to help you

Some people have calmly pointed out that it is not time to promote electronic labels. SAMSys, a company that manufactures card readers that can read barcodes from any manufacturer, said: "You must be realistic. I think MIT scientists are too optimistic." Many people can't hide their inner excitement. If the price of electronic tags can eventually be reduced to a penny, what would the world be like? By that time, it would be cheaper to stick electronic labels on goods than on bar codes, and there would be more information than bar codes. By then, everything has its own identity tag and can communicate with each other, and the world we live in has become ever more colorful.

Arnold Pandias, a scientist who won the Nobel Prize, once presided over the work of the Bell Labs and was one of the investors of the Aliens Technology company, envisioned such an interesting scenario:

One day, you got anxious because you couldn't find the glasses. In fact, it fell to the sofa in your living room. The electronic tag attached to the pair of glasses is connected to a reader at home, and the reader can receive the signal sent from the electronic tag on each item in the room at any time. The signal activates the electronic tag, which immediately responds to the signal. Signals are sent from lightning to lightning fast. Each electronic tag can make more than 100 responses in one second.

The reader sends information through a wireless network and downloads this information to a computer on the home. The computer discovered through reading the data that the time for the signal fed back by the electronic tag on the glasses to reach the card reader is equal to the time required for the feedback signal from the sofa to reach the card reader. So, when you sit at your computer and type in the search box: "Where's my glasses?" The computer immediately responds: "Under the sofa."

Arnold Pandias predicts confidently: “In a few years, high-end consumers will generally accept this way of using a tag reader to find items at home.”

Wide prospects for commercial use

In order to test the actual effect of this new technology, businessmen and manufacturers decided to work together. So they put electronic tags on all their supplies, and they can be seen everywhere in crates containing goods, big trucks, freight terminals, and even all warehouses. All companies participating in the trial are confidential, but it is said that the famous Wal-Mart and Pepsi are also among them. Industry watchers claim that the RFID technology is even better than expected. The "Automatic Identity Center" expects this test to continue until 2003, when the technology will be put into commercial use, and by 2005 it will be widely used. Some avant-garde consumers will even be eager to bring this electronic tag technology into their homes to get addicted ahead of schedule. According to a research organization called "Risk Development", the RFID industry will reach 1.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2002, and it will climb to 2.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2005. It seems that the outlook for this industry will be bright.