Sept. 4, 2008 – Carl Brown, President of Simply RFID, talks about their innovative, RFID-video, Knox asset tracking systems.

We have heard a bit about the Knox System. Tell us a little bit first about what that is?

BROWN: Knox came out a couple of years ago and the FBI came and talked to us and said we want to track assets. They were trying to track thousands of items in a warehouse.

What kind of warehouse does the FBI have? Is this evidence?

BROWN: It is not really evidence, because it is plasma TVs, stereo systems, anything else that sits in a typical inventory warehouse. They’re helping commercial companies catch thieves.

We discovered what they were doing was going back to video tape and trying to figure out, "we saw this tag go out the door; it shouldn’t have; who had it."

We said we can link all the video and RFID together and give them a system that allowed them to tag everything in real time, watch anything. Now you can actually put someone’s name in there and watch them as they walk through the hallways, because the RFID will actually follow them as they go through a building.

You are including personnel tags, are they like badges people wear?

BROWN: Personnel badges, laptops, PCs, anything that we can tag with RFID, whether or not it is passive or active, we can tag it and watch it in real time and record it and go back to figure out where it went.

We can figure out how many times someone goes in the storeroom, how often they take a break. We know if a laptop is moving and who is carrying it. And RFID lets us see all of that in historical purposes so that when something goes missing, three months later, we can type in the ID and find out where was the last place it was seen and what was it doing.

People who are wearing personnel badges, I would guess.

BROWN: Most of them are and we just upgraded up to Gen 2. A lot of them have the old HID personnel badges. We just add a UHF tag, the Gen 2 tags.

One of the big things that is happening in the last couple of years, Gen 2 is phenomenal. Two years ago it was just, it was a major breakthrough compared to Generation I, and every 6-12months, we see a massive improvement.

So once you have worked with the FBI and they started using this, how did that, where did that go with Knox?

BROWN: Well, that is when we realized that every commercial entity out there wants to track their stuff. We typically find customers that have at least 5,000 value assets in a building, PCs or anything like that, who want to track those assets. And that is when RFID really pays off at 5,000 and more assets per year in a single facility.

When you are talking about tracking, you are talking leaving one location, going to another. It is not real time location.

BROWN: It is not real time to an inch. But, we can get you into a zone about thirty feet wide, and know that that asset is within that thirty foot parameter.

Where does video fit into all of this?

BROWN: Once you know there is an asset there, you saw an asset go out of the door, but, all right, well, now what? Who was carrying it? Who had it?

That is where the video is great, because now you can see, okay, this is the person that walked out with the asset. This is the last time this asset was seen. What that really comes down to is that if someone is stealing assets, let's say the most common thing we see is people throwing assets in the trash compactor or bins. The last time you see it is at the trash bin. Now you have got video that links that person to dropping the asset right into the trash, how they are stealing the assets.

Oh, I see. I thought that somehow the whole system was integrated with video in it, but you are saying video is an add-on just for proof purposes.

BROWN: It is integrated completely. If I am watching the video, it shows me all the RFID tags that are currently in view in that frame. So, as I am watching the video, it says, hey, these five assets are currently in this picture. How many can you see? Well, there is one person carrying a box; the other four must be hidden inside that box somewhere.

That is how it is completely integrated into one system. You don’t have to have a video, but it does make it a lot better when you are trying to figure out what really happened.

Is it like one reader per zone sort of thing?

BROWN: We typically run four antennas off of each reader and they will cover about 1200 to 1600 square feet.

If a client were using video, would it be located with the reader or is that separate?

BROWN: We figure how many cameras we need for a certain area. Most rooms have between one and two cameras. You don’t typically see more than two. But, we try to cover both angles where we can see anybody doing anything in that particular area.

So, without the video, you more or less have a typical, so to speak, asset tracking system; but with the video, you are adding the ability to track assets on a particular video frame. Is it like a film frame sort of thing?

BROWN: Exactly. And we can generate full motion, full frame video out of that, so you can actually create a running tape to see how events unfolded and you can actually watch each frame and see which assets were in view at that time.

So the frame is identifying the reads, not just the visual picture.

BROWN: Correct. You have got it.