Tell me a little bit about your company. I know you guys are based out of Australia.

BLOMFIELD: Oh, no, we are based here. We started from developing security labels, where RFID really wasn’t commonplace, I guess. We approached RFID as a physical security component for a security label. So, intel agencies here use it. The government, you know, is aboard, with a broad base of agencies in the U.S.

What happened was that the Government asked us to prepare some physical security for RFID tags. They recognized it years ago, in fact, in 1990; so that is what we did. We used the knowledge that we had in physical security of labels and we applied that to RFID. And we developed Smart Secure, which is our brand name.

How was Smart Secure used by the Government originally?

BLOMFIELD: They didn’t tell us. It was mostly their, you know, intel agencies. I mean, we had meetings with people who we didn’t even know their names. Some that provide no names, no cards, in environments where they were safe houses; no offices. You know, that is how it really all started.

As long as they signed the check, right?

BLOMFIELD: Yeah, and they were very, very good at that time.

What industries sort of fell in line after this new application?

BLOMFIELD: In terms of RFID, where we really started to get some traction early on was in electronic vehicle registration. We have been put through years and years of testing, and environmental testing, in laboratories and race tracks. They actually test vehicles traveling along that straight, one hundred miles an hour; faster.

Over the years we have developed this technology which is very secure. I think it is 99.99% accurate. People can’t remove the tag; they can't use a razor blade; they can't use a saw; any sort of attacks. We have tried all these things ourselves, you know, to remove a tag from one item and put on another. So we thought this was really important for electronic vehicle registration.

We see the physical security component as the core function of our registration labels. There is no point in being able to be peel off a registration label and put it on another vehicle. That whole thing falls down, as it does in a lot of other industries, in the auto and gas utilities. Each of these has problems. Also pharmaceuticals, a major problem there.

As far as tamper proof tags go in ‘pharmaceuticals,’ who are the companies that have been interested?

BLOMFIELD: Distributors.

It is still early, in terms of the adoption phase for the industry; but what people are realizing is the incidents of counterfeiting are increasing year over year. Both the potential for financial losses, as well as the liability that is associated with the branding perspective and, you know, the health of the customers – makes the importance of product security very high.

You know, there has been buzz around RFID for a number of years because of all the different things that you can do with respect to storing historical information of the product flow – the original manufacturer all the way through how it flows through the supply chain, to ultimately the end user.

So you see the distributors as those pushing this in pharma?

BLOMFIELD: The other way to answer that is that what has been happening in RFID is getting the RFID performances right.

Everybody has been focused on, you know, will it last; will react with the metal; will it work through liquids and all those things, which they have now really gotten it down pat, pretty much. The technology has got this electronic security pretty much organized.

These security aspects are obviously what attracted government clients, right?

This was the government saying to us, “physical security is important.” But, nobody had ever considered the physical security then. They really thought that it was all about performance; and it was at the time. Only in the last, I would say, six to nine months where they have gone, “Oh, my God, physical security, I can't believe it! We didn’t even think about it.”