Research of the Auto-ID Labs presented at GS1 event

As part of their research for GS1, members of the Auto-ID Labs research network give regular updates about their applied research in the areas of RFID technology & performance, consumer services and future trends of auto-id technologies.

The most recent update (overview) was provided at GS1's Industry and Standards Event in Brooklyn, March 2011.

Ed Schuster from MIT presented (slides) recent work about using RFID together with polymer material as powerless sensors to measure temperature and strain of bridges. As such, the safety of the material of bridges could be continuously measured and fed directly to the
EPCglobal Architecture Framework.

Jin Mitsugi from the Keio Lab reported (slides) about how to improve the lifecycle management of electric appliances in the home. As the EPC has been established in supply-chains but the consumers in the homes are missing the ability to read and write information to these RFID tags, Mitsugi presented a dual interface passive RFID tag: it incorporates the standards UHF Gen 2 interface for standards RFID readers and it additionally features a basedband interface to the tag's memory which can the linked to ZigBee/WLAN or any other appropriate connection being available in the home. Thus, a system can be build to manage the lifecycle of appliances also beyond the point of sales in people's homes.

Myself I had the chance to discuss (slides) the increasing popularity of shopping apps and the importance of barcode scanning in retail. As part of this research I disclosed first results of our analysis concerning barcode data inconsistencies. Triggered by GS1's Data Crunch report [1], we investigated the responses to 220.000 barcode queries triggered by users of two productive mobile apps. We compared the responses of different information providers and could reveal missing information (37% of the queries), wrong information and inconsistent information (spelling, multiple names for single barcodes).
The analysis is still on-going and will be summarized in an upcoming publication and whitepaper.
One approach might also be to position GS1 as the authorative source for barcode information.

Finally, Mark Harrison reported (slides) about recent projects in aerospace, lifecycle management, and event-based pedigreee for healthcare.
For details see also here.

Overall, it has been a very helpful discussion about future research directions of the Auto-ID Labs. It was good to see that the academic perspective of the labs and the business-focussed view of GS1 and members has many topics in common: consumers services, quality of barcode master data and the provision of GS1 master to consumer apps. The labs are looking forward to support GS1 in becoming the trusted source of master data for barcode consumer apps.

Visiting Manhattan, first, I was surprised about the crazy weather and, second, about IMHO a really complicated queuing system at the check-out of Whole Foods: customers are queueing in six lines, each assigned with a color. Then both screen display and audio announcement advice the customers in the pole positions of their lines to approach to a specific checkout identified by a number, run!,...


[1] GS1 UK: V.C., Data crunch report: The impact of bad data on profits and customer service in the UK grocery industry, 2009.

Korea Visit: Auto-ID Labs meeting and conferences

I was invited to give two talks one on the status of European research in RFID and sensor networks and another one on our current research in St. Gallen and ETH Zurich. When I was talking about our new iphone app Peaks (which I was proud to test successfully in Korea!) I received an interesting comment“…there is no iphone in Korea.”.

In conjunction with the conference there was also a fascinating exhibition about RFID. I must admit I ‘ve never visited interesting RFID exhibition so far mostly showing reader gates and tags, but this one was really exciting. Obviously, “green” is an important topic also in Korea which was reflected by at least four high-tech bicycle renting systems providing access to public bikes through RFID cards in combination with sophisticated locks. Slightly over-engineered but exciting indeed. I noticed green-ouse monitoring, sensor-augmented Taek-Wondo gear and the usual stuff, such as smart shelfe and military apps. Finally, the electronic colorful price tags gave a good impression about the opportunities of display information in our supermarkets of tomorrow.

As part of the conference we got access to the running Incheon Expo displaying technology and future vision of living of tomorrow, again with a dedicated focus on “green technology”. Due to the fear of the H1N1 virus we first had to pass a disinfection gate before entering the site – pretty strange experience. Among others, I enjoyed the art pieces showing how to sweep the ground off virtually leaves (once all trees have died but to maintain the tradition;) and the auto-transformation of textual news into graphical icons. In the exhibition I noticed the quite different notion of responsibility: instead of the rather individual share as we practice in Europe meaning everybody tries to contribute his share by his individual behavior, I understood that in Korea this is rather centralized and delegated to institutions, government and companies taking care of you.

Finally, I got the chance to travel South to the another event, the Koala 2009 RFID USN conference where I gave another talk on my favorite topic of building an Internet of Things for everyone. I took the chance of a train ride in order to enjoy the country-side from a window seat. Korea consists of countless hills – in order to gain culture land land is often reclaimed at the sea side.

After several conservations I was amazed about the huge funds of Korea provided for research and education, the huge percentage of academics of the population ( was told over 80% would study – though I haven’t verified), and tremendous attitude of almost living at the work place. I guess we’ll hear more from Korean rather soon…

Announcement: CfP - What can the Internet of Things do for the Citizen?

The workshop "What can the Internet of Things do for the Citizen?" (CIOT), Workshop @ Pervasive 2010, Helsinki, May 17, 2010, is accepting submissions.
I have the great pleasure to announce that our Pervasive workshop proposal "What can the Internet of Things do for the Citizen?" (CIOT) has been accepted at The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2010).

We (Stephan Karpischek (ETH Zurich), Albrecht Schmidt (Univ. of Duisburg-Essen), and myself) are soliciting submissions describing applications, tackling infrastructure issues, introducing meaningful forms of interaction as well as articles discussing business scenarios that show the commercialization of Internet-of-Things applications for citizens. What if we had technology that gathered data from things of our daily lives, tracked and counted everything in order to solve citizens’ needs (e.g. reduce waste, prevent loss, and improve search)?

The reception of the call in the community was quite overwhelming such that we managed to organize a quite remarkable PC for this workshop.

Please find the detailed call here: www.autoidlabs.org/events/ciot2010

You may also express your interest on facebook.

We are looking forward to your submissions!

Visiting our Auto-ID Lab in Keio

After the pervasive conference in Nara I headed back to Tokyo again to visit our Keio Auto-ID Lab in Fujisawa. Besides discussing the continuation of the Internet of Things conference we started back in 2008 in Zurich, I got a nice tour and was particularly amazed to see the works on the recorder tag [1] and tag monitor, an active RFID tag mimicing a passive tag but allowing to monitoring the data-traffic between tag and reader.
My schedule was pretty packed and intense. First, I gave short talk (slides) about what we are doing in Zurich, then had the great chance of visiting a lecutre of Jeff Lawrence, global policy officer of Intel (you find a short bio here). Quite interesting, this lecture was broadcasted live to several other universities in Asia. He talked (these slides are mostly it) about policy in digital content policy. He mentioned that protection does not have to be perfect, e.g. DVD is broken but still supports a business model (the same argument also applies to anti-counterfeiting). France has passed a law against content protection - most important argument: access to internet is a human right! Intel wants to press ahead, rather lead than follow, as a tech provider for hollywood when selling technical assets: if people do not like it they do not use it at all. He mentioned the case of betamax: hollywood tried to make the producers liable. Generally, he outlined that policy always comprises different bodies: service providers, content providers, it, ce, government.

Intel's policy perspective is: everything free vs. content is king, respect intellectual proprty for right holders and consumers. Protected content but should be moveable.

Law cannot solve all problems: it's about business and not about good or bad.

Every content scheme is to be broken: only good enough to break business model...does not work against hackers - but that's law enforcement is for. Overal goals: keep honest people honest, perfect systems are not possible, commercial viability is key.

Technology goals: design freedom, low cost (no body pays for protection), world-wide availability. "Apple builds services to sell elegant devices...", Intel want's to acknowledge a diversity of sources, where as Apple is just in verticals. His final thoughts were interesting: DRM-free is the best world - but how to make money out of it?

Finally, I also could arrange a last-minute meeting with Masaki Ito who gave me a nice tour around Prof. Hideyuki Tokoda's Lab. They showed me impressive prototypes of the objsampler [2] - a pipette that records real objects one encounters over time - and the airy nodes [3] that measured the temperature in Tokyo's Shinjuki garden and focussed on simplyfying the set-up of larger sensor networks. In the end I also got to see the smart they are currently setting-up allowing to experiment with smart home environments where various items can be controlled remotely, e.g. mobile phone.
Overall, I very much enjoyed my visit at Keio and I'm looking forward to get back there for a much longer stay some time later...

[1] MITSUGI, JIN; TOKUMASU, OSAMU; HADA, HISAKAZU: RF Tag with RF and Baseband Communication Interfaces for Product Lifecycle Management, Auto-ID Labs Whitepaper, 2009, AUTOIDLABS-WP-HARDWARE-046.pdf
[2] Junichi Yura, Hideaki Ogawa, Taizo Zushi, Jin Nakazawa, Hideyuki Tokuda, "objSampler: A Ubiquitous Logging Tool for Recording Encounters with Real World Objects" rtcsa, pp.36-41, 12th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA'06), 2006
[3] Ito, M.; Katagiri, Y.; Ishikawa, M.; Tokuda, H., "Airy Notes: An Experiment of Microclimate Monitoring in Shinjuku Gyoen Garden" Networked Sensing Systems, 2007. INSS '07. Fourth International Conference on , vol., no., pp.260-266, 6-8 June 2007

Impressions from IEEE RFID in Disney World/Orlando

I just got the chance to visit the IEEE RFID conference since together with Mikko, a Ph.D. student of ours, we were presenting two papers at this event in the area of RFID security [1][2].
It was quite striking to see how this conference grew. IEEE RFID has received 175 submissions whereof 47 had been accepted and presented in three tracks.

The conference was opened by a keynote from Chris Diorio, co-founder of Impinj and assistant professor at UW. After pointing out the history of the developments concerning UHF RFID he drew some interesting conclusions with regards to future challenges and research. Firstly, as development of RFID initially mainly aimed at replacing barcodes, security and privacy aspects had been neglected at first and only came in later. However, in his perspective especially privacy is not as bad as suggested, it is not primarily research, it rather has a lot do with media and education. Thus, researchers should rather focus on security technology, but the problem of privacy as such is not really research. It is about perception and should be solved by education.
Secondly, he mentioned reader zone confiment as a major research challenges. Today, it still is the number one reason for end-users users to give up with RFID when they do not manage to only read tags in the intended zone instead of random others due to artifacts stemming from the environment, e.g. reflection.

There was an interesting presentation about the development of a 2.4Ghz tag readable by a mobile phone's antenna [3]. This work really broadened the perspective of reading UHF and HF tags as we have discussed earlier [4] and even allows to remotely power sensors sitting on the passive tag by the emitting mobile phone. This work is part of the EU project Mimosa.
Another remarkable paper was presented by Rahul Bahattacharyya from the Auto-ID Lab at MIT and was about how to use RFID tags to sense displacement [5]: the basic idea is to place a metal plate in front of an RFID tag attenuating its power backscatter. The paper proves the idea in an experimental set-up by showing the monotonical relationship between power backscatter and distance from tag to the metal plate.
Another paper, awarded with the best-paper awared and presented by Alansson Sample [6], took a similar direction of turning the properties of bad tag performance under certain conditions into a benefit for sensing a specific phenomenon. He made use of the fact that users touching a dipole antenna of an RFID tag add capacity which slows down the tag's discharge behaviour. Accordingly, this effect can implement a power-free touch-based interface. Suggested applications could be powerless switches, remote controls and alike. The very same effect of changed capacity could be also applied to sense the presence of liquids with RFID tags.

Finally, the conference organizers also managed to really apply RFID for some practical purposes. First of all each conference badge contains a tag which can be read by exhibitors to collect your adress. It's convenient for them but from an interaction perspective it feels kind of odd when you look into an RFID 'gun' and get 'shot'. Second, if visiting a course of three vendors' booths one could win a video camera. You collected one RFID tag at each vendor and only if you had all three tags together the reader at the last station let you enter into the lottery. Nothing ground breaking but deployed...

Ariving in Orlando I was surprised that public transport actually was not that bad. They have buses every half hour into different directions, even an express one (golynx.com no. 111) directly to Disney. 40km for 2$ - not a bad deal. The little handsight of course, it's a little hard to find out where the buses depart and they end at the 'central ticket center' where private Disney buses take you to the hotel. When asking at the hotel where I could catch the public bus back to the airport they were really puzzled: "Public bus!? - never heared of that, you' re the first person asking for, unfortunately we don't have an affiliation with them!". This again shows that for successful logistics transportation and information have to go together...

[1] Lehtonen, M., Michahelles, F., Fleisch, E.: How to Detect Cloned Tags in a Reliable Way from Incomplete RFID Traces. In the IEEE RFID 2009 Conference, Orlando, Florida, April 2009.
[2] Lehtonen, M., Ruhanen, A., Michahelles, F., Fleisch, E.: Serialized TID Numbers – A Headache or a Blessing for RFID Crackers? In the IEEE RFID 2009 Conference, Orlando, Florida, April 2009.
[3] Yann Tétu, Iiro Jantunen, Bertrand Gomez, Stephanie Robinet^:Mobile-phone-readable 2.45 GHz Passive Digital Sensor Tag. In the IEEE RFID 2009 Conference, Orlando, Florida, April 2009.
[4] T. Wiechert, F. Thiesse, F. Michahelles, P. Schmitt, E. Fleisch: Connecting Mobile Phones to the Internet of Things: A Discussion of Compatibility Issues between EPC and NFC, Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), Keystone, Colorado, USA, 2007, [PDF].
[5] Rahul Bhattacharyya, Christian Floerkemeier, Sanjay Sarma: Towards Tag Antenna Based Sensing – An RFID Displacement Sensor. In the IEEE RFID 2009 Conference, Orlando, Florida, April 2009.
[6] Alanson Sample, Daniel Yeager, Joshua Smith: A Capacitive Touch Interface for Passive RFID Tags. In the IEEE RFID 2009 Conference, Orlando, Florida, April 2009.

Dissertation about NFC payment

Tom Wiechert finally had his disputation. He was analyzing the economics of contactless payments based on NFC. There, he compared the transaction costs and fees of various other payment systems (credit card, debit card, cash...) against NFC payment. Tom came up with a mathematical
model calculating different scenarios for retailers introducing NFC payment. His thesis [1] will be published soon on auto-id labs.org.
Throughout his thesis work he wrote an article [2] on the differences and communalities between EPC and NFC which got cited a quite bit, recently.

[1] (link to follow, search here)
[2] T. Wiechert, F. Thiesse, F. Michahelles, P. Schmitt, E. Fleisch: Connecting Mobile Phones to the Internet of Things: A Discussion of Compatibility Issues between EPC and NFC, Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), Keystone, Colorado, USA, 2007, [PDF].

Auto-ID Labs Meeting @ GSMP & JAG in LA

I'm just caming back from our half-yearly Auto-ID Labs meeting. It's always great meeting the colleagues from the other labs, exchanging ideas, getting new insights into on-going work, and to consolidate the overall labs' strategy as such.
Then it was also fun presenting research results not only among us but also to key staff from EPCglobal, GS1 and end-user companies. It seems that we have inspired our audience, as I found this piece of "user-generated content" (to the right) on one of the tables after the meeting - maybe we should investigate how these art could be used as an implicit ratings of meetings...

You find an overview of on-going research and presentations here.

Another political discussion about RFID

Finally RFID is in the news again. A referendum [1] is currently being put together on the issue of RFID in the upcoming Swiss Passport. The arguments are the common ones, citation of known internet stories where different passports have been hacked, RFID wouldn't be secure and people could be traced everywhere. Let me just briefly mention that in these contexts hacking a passport mainly means to read an ID - you know I can read the entire passport by just looking at the pages, does that mean paper printing is insecure;)? Not to mention the ubiquitous tracking device in our pockets, the mobile phone, where nobody complains about.
What, however, is striking, and is independent of RFID as such, is the plan of the swiss government to store all personal data including bio-metric data in a central database. That definitely sounds threatning, however, has nothing to do with RFID! Rather the opposite: RFID allows for de-centralized data-storage and leaves much more control to the owner than reference numbers with central storages...
Why is the campaign actually using a barcode print [2] when accusing RFID!? Btw, the barcode identifies blank video-tapes, just try it out and read it with your phone using Barcoo[3].
Maybe also the approach is wrong: How would people react on the chip in the passport if they would get some discount or rebate when travelling to different countries? Privacy is sacred but easily sold for a 1% discount in the nearby supermarket. Albrecht Schmidt envisions in his recent blog [4] people selling information about their daily life, e.g. their sleeping pattern - perhaps that's not so far-fetched if the discount on the matress is alright...

[1] http://www.freiheitskampagne.ch/
[2] http://www.rfid-nein.ch/
[3] http://www.barcoo.de/
[4] http://albrecht-schmidt.blogspot.com/2009/03/next-big-thing-lets-look-into-future.html

Cyber Physical System is the US version of the 'internet of things'

At percom I had the chance to listen to an interesting talk from Ty Znati. It took a while I understood what he was talking about: 'cyber physical systems' [1] is in NSF-language what the EU calls 'internet of things'!

[1] NSF Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems, http://varma.ece.cmu.edu/cps/

[2] From Internet of Data to Internet of Things. 28 January 2009. Gérald Santucci.

My impressions of Percom 2009

It was an interesting experience for me to finally visit the PerCom conference itself for a first time, after having organized a workshop there quite some time ago [1]. It's hard to distinguish between ubicomp, pervasive, percom and many other second tier venues - but definitely the visitors at percom seem to be much more from an networking and sensor networks background.

The conference was opened with a fabulous keynote from Gregory Abowd. He was stating the fact that more and more scientific meetings center around ubicomp which inherently bears the danger of fracturization of our community. So the difference for papers at the major venues (ubicomp/pervasive/percom) really should be focus on a variety of perspectives instead narrow focus only. I also enjoyed his statement about stopping the quest for the killer-app and yet coming up with new scenarios but rather to listen to the users and domain experts in order to recognize needs and to try to tackle those. He reminded that also Marc Weiser focuses on human activities instead of machines. Gregory predicted that we would made three thirds of the way for making ubicomp as a reality. The interesting time of today is that dreams of 15 years ago can be realized now. Finally, he came up with following guidelines for successful ubicomp research:

• Include various disciplines - you can't do all yourself.
• Seek out critique: who are your friends motivating you, who are your enemies evaluating you and guiding you?
• Solving a real-world problem has the danger of NOT doing research - but it may rewarding anyway.
• Remember ubiquity: What can you assume in your home? Start from detectable events, e.g. power noise of switches.
• Make it matter, think about meaningful applications.
• Passion is not sufficient (but necessary): go one step beyond honorable causes

The second day was opened by another remarkable keynote given by Andrew Campbell. He set out quite provocatively, especially for the percom audience: “Motes are dead: they not ubiquitous, suffer of power, people are out of the loop, they don't scale!”. Instead, he praised the emergence of mobile phones equipped with sensors that allow to study social relationships at a much bigger scale.
Andrew campbell
Motes are dead: not ubiquitous, power problem, people out of the loop, does not scale. He presented some examples from his own research, MetroSense [2], Bikenet [3], and Cenceme [4] - showing the capabilities of phones to detect context and to share on at larger scale. I found it striking that recognition of sitting, standing, walking - which has been shown years before [5] - now has a new quality and actually might become useful in the context of facebook. However, Andrew also had to admit that despite its ubiquity the mobile phone has not been quite build for sensing tasks, since after two hours of sensing the battery might be dead - so people could start de-installing such apps…
My question about his experience concerning adoption of his Cenceme was interesting: his students actually did not care about privacy, the off-button was an important design feature, control mechanisms of facebook allowing to grant access to friends he saw as the important features for getting it adopted. Most interestingly, Andrew himself said, he never would share sensor data about himself with others…

On the third day I was very glad of having been invited to the panel discussion about “Ubicomp is still not there, does nobody want it?” moderated by Christian Baecker. In my initial statement I said first of all we should be aware of the limitations of our research, it's not us driving adoption. If we want to do so we have to start listening more to users and stakeholders. Furthermore, it's not that bad, first devices such as Nabaztag, Tikitag, Choudy, picture frames with embedded WLAN actually show first instances of disappearing computing embedded in our homes. Cao build upon that and fostered the need for contuining research in systems that scale. Ty Zanati highlighted the need of understanding the nature of applications, focus on interoperability, privacy, and the seek for standards. Finally, Andrew Campbell was provoking again with questioning a common identity of the community: What defines us? Technology is still visible, what is our achievement, we need an identity. Then the discussion focused much about the prominent role of mobile phones: great platform and large scale adopted ubicomp device on the one hand but bearing the danger of occluding non-human related ubicomp apps on the other hand. After having a really appreciated discussion about that topic, Stephe Ward finally made a nice closing remark, taking out the almost religious belief in Mark Weiser: “The profound visions are those that disappear.”

Finally, I enjoyed two demos, one about robots controlled by RFID for providing a mobile simulation environment for testing WLAN protocols [6], the other one about a mobile shopping assistant placing avatars on mobile phones giving product recommendations [7] which was close to what Felix von Reischach has presented at the conference [8]


[1] Pervasive RFID/NFC Technology and Applications Workshop (PerTec 2007), www.autoidlabs.org/pertec
[2] MetroSense, http://metrosense.cs.dartmouth.edu/
[3] Bikenet, bikenet.cs.dartmouth.edu
[4] CenceMe, www.cenceme.org
[5] Junker, Holger and Ward, Jamie A and Lukowicz, Paul and Tröster, Gerhard: User Activity Related Data Sets for Context Recognition, Proceedings of the Workshop on Benchmarks and a Database for Context Recognition, in conjunction with Pervasive Conference 2004.
[6] RFID Based Localization for a Miniaturized Robotic Platform for Wireless Protocols Evaluation", Vikram P. Munishwar, Shailendra Singh, Christopher Mitchell, Xiaoshuang Wang, Kartik Gopalan, Nael B. Abu-Ghazaleh, Computer Science, Binghamton University (State University of New York) and S*ProCom2, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (USA)
[7] Social Mobile Augmented Reality for Retail, Sinem Güven, Ohan Oda, Mark Podlaseck, Harry Stavropoulos, Sai Kolluri, Gopal Pingali, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (USA)
[8] A Mobile Product Recommendation System Interacting with Tagged Products, F. von Reischach, D. Guinard, F. Michahelles, E. Fleisch, Concise Contribution at the Seventh Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2009), United States, March 2009.

Some articles about the Internet of Things

An article [1] just pointed me to the fact that the vision of the Internet of Things is about ten years old now, after early work has started at Auto-ID Center at MIT. This was my trigger to search for current papers describing and discussing the Internet of Things.
A rather critical articel, [1], proposes to envision the Internet of Things as a hierarchy of objects with different capabilities instead of a network of fully peer connected items, as layed out in the early days of the Auto-ID Center [2]. In order to develop robust business cases, these heterogeneous requirements (tagging of strawberries, cheap items with short life-time, is different from cars with changing configurations) of objects have to be tackled with different technologies, e.g. barcode/RFID/sensor-networks. This is a reasonable argument against building an Internet of Things only RFID, RFID should be part of it, but others, barcode, as well.



Finally, I found a master thesis describing an art project about collecting and sharing stories about objects [3], which the authors calls an internet for things. It's probably not the killer-application but could be a nice consumer gadget for the EPCglobal architecture.

An interesting (but weired;) article is [4], where Rob Kranenburg (btw - the supervisor of [3]) argues for a society that should be in control of the (ubicomp) surveillance technologies it develops. The article is a little bit copious but provides nice arguments for why consumers should be empowered to play a mature role in an Internet of Things.

[1] Bob Williams, What is the Real Business Case for the Internet of Things?, Synthesis Journal, iTSC, 2008
[2] McFarlane, D.C., Sarma, S.E., Chirn, J.L., Wong, C.Y., and Ashton,
K., „The Intelligent Product in Manufacturing Control“, Journal of EAIA, July 2002
[3] Patrick Plaggenborg, Social RFID - internet for things, Master Thesis, Utrecht School of the Arts, August 2006.
[4] Rob van Kranenburg, The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID.

User study: bar-code vs. epc-rfid vs. nfc

If you are an application designer concerned about which interaction modality (barcode/epc/nfc) consumers could favor most, have a look at this study we've just conducted lately:

From devices to services

It has been propagated for long: smart things, disappearing computers, ubiquitous computing, wearable computing, pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, internet of things - various terms viewing from different the very same phenomenon - things are now longer just thingsm but have virtual counterparts that expand their original capabilities.
It has been a nice vision, which is becoming deployed now: apple has come up with iTunes, originally only selling music, but today also selling software, Google has started something similar with Android, and Nokia has started promoting their Ovi. The economist has come up with two nice articles discussing this phenomenon in greater detail.



[1] Gadgets, Thinking inside the box - There is more to portable electronic gadgets than just fancy hardware, Dec 4th 2008, From The Economist print edition

[2]Nokia, Ovi go again - The world’s biggest handset-maker makes a new push into mobile services, Dec 4th 2008, From The Economist print edition

Visiting the Metro Future Store in Tönisvorst

As part of the RFID courses I have been giving together with Matthias Lampe for the European EPC Competence Center (EECC) for some years now I finally had the chance to visit Metro's new Future Store in Tönisvorst.
First of all, it's a brand new hypermarket huge in size with wide alleys which makes the market quite appealing even without the 'future' label.
What attracts media and what probably is most appealing are a couple of gadgets:

a digital advertising column built of a rotating line of led's
a self-checkout for customer's reading the barcode with their mobile phones (as nowhere mentioned: which by the way was developed by Robert Adelmann of ETH)
download of the 'supermarket' ringtone via bluetooth (I wonder who will ever do that, but I might be wrong;)
the 'multi-component' menue - works without technology, based on color codes, one can easily 'customize' meals based certain side-dishes and main courses - the color code helps for achieving 'compatibility'... I can imagine that as quite successfull.
the 'sound shower' removes the need of putting on heads when listening to CD's since the sound is directed only to the user standing under the shower. It's a quite fascinating experience. Just imagine what you could do when covering the entire ceiling with tiles of that system and combining it with indoor localization...unobtrusive whispering anytime anywhere.
then there is the wine testing, operated through supermarket's member card. Looks nice and works well.
the make-up machine gives suggestions on products by virtual make-up: user's photo get's overlayed with the make-up effects.
the skin machine evaluates the user's fat in the skin and recommends products. Well...without a guided tour, I probably would not have spent attention to that machine...
then, there is the check-out which I have seen in operation in the US already years ago. It works but at least currently there are plenty of human 'helpers' in place.
Finally, I could see the first 'kill-tag' machine. It works but 'interestingly, since May 2008 only five users have ever killed tags' mentioned our guide proudly and deriving from that that users wouldn't care about RFID anymore. But why should they if in the current store not even a single product is tagged with RFID!?

Overall, it was a nice visit - just it had nothing to do with RFID as it was our course visitors' and ourselves' expectation...
Finally, the famous robot did not work either;(