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Omron Boosts RFID Capacity

Omron has announced that RFID inlay manufacturing capacity will be increased to support production of more than 250 million inlays per year at its Minakuchi factory in Shiga, Japan. This factory location was chosen to take advantage of its more than 30 years of experience with semiconductors and class 10000 clean room standards. The company will continue to add inlay production capacity to further increase annual production above 350 million inlays within the next 12 months.

KDDI Announces 3G CDMA Data Card

Axalto today announced that it has launched the first third generation CDMA User Identification Module (UIM) commercial card in Japan with KDDI, one of Japan’s leading mobile service providers. The Axalto cards are designed to work together with KDDI’s CDMA 2000 EV-DO third generation mobile handsets. KDDI subscribers can now access both GSM and CDMA networks with just one card and users will be able to use the same telephone number both domestically and internationally.

RFID Cigarette Vending Machines

The Tobacco Institute of Japan said Thursday it will start switching cigarette vending machines nationwide to new machines featuring an age-verification system from March 2008 to prevent minors from buying cigarettes. The institute announced that a total of 620,000 tobacco vending machines nationwide will be switched during 2008 to types that can read “tobacco cards” with integrated circuit chips bought by adult smokers.

Not surpised, we’ve seen the same age verification function on “Sake Pass” machines [ .jpg image ] for some time already — Eds.

Omron Antenna Boosts RFID

Japan-based Omron Corp. has developed a electronic control antenna technology claimed to be the first embedded in an UHF-band RFID reader that can improve RFID tag reading performance. UHF RFID tags have been subject to multipath interference, an inherent problem of electromagnetic signals, which can make an RFID tag unreadable even if it is within the range of the reader.

Suica Mashup Mapping

Sherelog is a system that fetches data from JR’s Suica RFID train pass and visualizes personal train-ride records on a large public map (or Google Map). Koutaro Hashimoto, Yasuhiro Suzuki, Toshio Iwai, Michitaka Hirose showed this system at the Japan Media Arts Festival earlier this month. The developers’ intentions seem to be (1) to support people to remember their personal travel histories and reflect upon them and (2) to create unique opportunities for communications by making it extremely easy to share personal travel histories.

Use QR Code to Call a Taxi

K-cab is a SMS-based service for calling taxicabs, which is available in Iwate prefecture. The service can also be used with QR codes that encode location information. Vending machines that bear such location-encoded QR codes are being installed in varous places in the prefecture so that people can easily call a cab just by taking a picture of a QR code with their camera phones and connecting to the K-cabs’ taxicab dispatch website.