Word: rfid
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...annual fee of $40 lets riders tool around on a three-speed bike as often as they like for up to three hours at a time. Better be punctual: your second tardy return gets you booted from the system. The program keeps track of the bikes via tiny rfid chips, the same tamper-proof radio-frequency devices used to monitor everything from clothing inventories to office ID badges. Riders use a swipe card to unlock the bikes, and if they fail to return them--or if the bikes are stolen on their watch--they'll be out $200. SmartBikes will...
Enfucell batteries won't power your digital camera, your flashlight or your watch. At 1.5 volts they might be sufficiently powerful, but they don't last long enough. Rather, Happonen hopes first to sell large quantities to the makers of RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, which don't draw constant power and lend themselves to the battery's thinness. RFID tags are the tiny chips that are replacing bar codes. They wirelessly transmit information about themselves, making it easier to track, say, what's in stock in a store. Battery-powered RFID tags can transmit farther than non-battery-powered...
...RFID isn't new technology--its lineage can be traced back to World War II, when the Allies used a similar principle to tell friendly aircraft from foes. But RFID got a boost in the late 1990s, when two MIT professors hit on RFID tags as a way to help robots "see" the physical objects around them. That's the genius of RFID: it's a way to make the ordinary physical world of people and objects visible to the virtual world that computers inhabit. It maps real space onto virtual space, so the two worlds can talk to each...
Which is exciting but also a bit scary for anyone who doesn't want to be mapped. For RFID tags are just as useful for tracking living organisms as they are for tracking library books. Vets have been implanting RFID chips in pets for years, and there's a NASDAQ-traded company called VeriChip that manufactures RFID chips specifically for use in human beings, the idea being that the chips would provide a quick and reliable way to store and retrieve emergency medical information; VeriChip is also marketed in South America as a way to track kidnap victims...
...cheaper RFID tags get, the more ubiquitous they'll become. But personally I envision a slightly more benign future, one in which the trend of human-implantable RFID tags merges with the online social-networking craze. What if all the information in your Facebook profile were tucked snugly into a tiny RFID-like chip embedded, say, in the ball of your thumb? Your RFID-enabled cell phone could beep every time you walked past somebody two degrees of separation or less from you or who had the same favorite novel you do or who liked to play Scrabble and wasn...