Report from RFID Expo 2008

Verena over at PingMag filed a great report, from her visit to the recent RFID expo held in Tokyo, with an overview of several embedded tag designs including the school uniform emblem pictured below. As we posted previously (Here and Here), RFID trials with students - and prisoners - continues to be a hot topic especially considering the more recent noise about youngsters mobile phone usage.

We also noticed this article via IHT focused on the march towards NFC in EU markets. One of the interesting quotes therein related to getting enabled devices into customers hands which is one of the critical steps for adoption. The RFID chip on SIM strategy, which was demonstrated by Vodafone Japan (video here) back in 2004, appears to have gained support from the various major partners.

While it’s certainly a few gigabytes of data across our desk since then, we seem to recall there was an ‘issue’ (security?) with having those two key functions combined on the same chip. At any rate, that would address the speed to market by allowing existing devices to upgrade with a simple sim swap.