Issue #248 | Aug. 26, 2010 | by Bill Collins

There is nothing unusual about scientific advances first being used on college campuses. In fact, that is what brought RFID from a World War II relic technology to modern-day usage.

Ohio University, in Athens, established an Automatic Identification and Capture Lab in 1988. That is where the thoughts of replacing bar codes were first nurtured. By the 90's the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was where the work and testing came to fruition and birthed today's commercial RFID applications.

It seems natural the MIT Media Lab would pioneer the use of RFID with touchscreens, as last week's RFID Street detailed. The impressive, 163,000 sq. ft., glass-enclosed building makes a great showcase for an enhanced, interactive wayfinding and personalized information system.

Chaki Ng, a 36-year-old PhD candidate at Harvard University with a background in eLearning, was part of a team of ten students and faculty who created these systems.

Ng’s background in adaptive learning gives him a unique perspective on how children and adults think and learn. This helps Ng understand the opportunity retailers now have to leverage personalized interactive technology like this.

This may be where we learn how to help shoppers navigate and shop stores in a way that’s easier, more fun and more personalized.

The network encourages visitors to talk and socialize
Visitors RFID-tagged badges allow them to use the large LCD screen together to access, exchange and save information and ideas. This more social user experience is very different from the types of user experiences we typically find today with single-user and one-way signage and kiosk systems.

If the visitor touches the “I’m Interested” button associated with a project, an item icon will be added to their portfolio. These serve as “bookmarks.” Visitors can learn of new projects, collect that information, and later during the visit be reminded to view a related demo in a different area.

If the visitor touches the “More Like This” button, they are shown an “S-curve” graphic driven by the system’s AI engine which – much like Amazon.com or Netflix.com – will recommend other Media Lab projects that may interest them.

Chaki Ng sees retail as the next frontier for “Adaptive Experiences”
“No two learners learn the same way and at the same pace, so you need to personalize and follow their ‘path’ to learning,” Ng said. “This concept of ‘adaptive’ is now very popular and is quite well-understood by people involved in e-learning and e-commerce, but in physical spaces like retail we have not yet developed these adaptive experiences.

“Shoppers go to a store. We look at the merchandise organized in aisles and buy it if we like it. That process of shopping hasn’t really changed for thousands of years,” Ng said. "Essentially, we rely on the retailer to present us what they think we will like.

“In a retail store, my feet act the way that a mouse acts with a computer. I ‘browse’ the store by moving myself from one place to another,” Chaki Ng expanded. “To look for something, oftentimes I look at static signage to sort by category and sometimes I ask a sales associate. So then I point my mouse (my feet) to the target space. . . . I look, I see something, and I move my feet in the direction to where I might want to buy something.

“If I don’t see something, chances are I won’t know it exist somewhere in the store,” Ng continued. “This reminds me a lot of directory-based search engines from the 1990s. It also reminds me that retail physical space is not yet smart enough to help me explore something in a less linear and more spontaneous and fun fashion.”

Conventional wayfinding directories don’t know who you are
To help people navigate retail stores, shopping malls and other large venues, Ng pointed out that the in-store digital navigation tool that is used most often today – electronic directories – do little more than just duplicate the printed building directories they replaced.

“They (electronic directories) are one-size-fits-all,” Ng said. “They install five screens, but the screens all say the same thing and display everything possible. . . The directory doesn’t know who I am, nor help me explore more easily.

“We need to make these screens more personal so that they can display more appropriate information about their respective areas,” Ng believes. To fix this problem, he suggests retailers find ways to emulate the Netflix or Amazon model in the store, where the website recognizes the online shopper and makes recommendations to that shopper based on the pattern of her previous “stops” inside the store.

Ng commented that the interactive on-screen features of The Glass Infrastructure just scratch the surface of this personalized interactivity. When a specific visitor to a public space is recognized electronically, through RFID for example, and when the media network makes recommendations to that visitor, the possibilities are exciting.

As retailers leverage their loyalty-card data and transaction data to provide consumers with opt-in choices, that is when networks like The Glass Infrastructure will take digital screenmedia to the next level at retail.

Bill Collins is principal of DecisionPoint Media Insights, which produces custom research and consulting on digital screenmedia networks that are deployed at retail and out of home.
Collins can be reached at bill@decisionpointmedia.com.

Issue #247 | Aug. 19, 2010 | by Bill Collins

A new RFID-enabled, interactive wayfinding and personalized information system makes the new Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab’s a truly enhanced experience. Large-format LCD touchscreens, appropriately called “The Glass Infrastructure,” are mounted throughout the 163,000 sq. ft. glass-enclosed building.

This crystal palace of science points to the future of screenmedia in retail and public spaces. ( Retail implications, on RFID Street next week) Appropriately enough, MIT was the main incubator of the commercial RFID propagating the planet today.

If this more social and interactive model catches on, we can also expect to see personalized, social, screenmedia systems being deployed on university campuses, shopping malls, convention centers and other environments that serve the public.

The new $90 million building at the MIT Cambridge campus is sheathed in metal screening and glass which allows about half of the ambient outdoor sunlight to reach the interior. From the outside “you can look all the way through it from one end to the other,” according to Boston Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell; a “classic marriage of form and content.”

In the Globe’s review, Media Lab Director Frank Moss said, “Glass forces collaboration. We’ll put very different groups near one another [in the new building]. And we’ll have video screens everywhere, too, so people can tune in on what others are doing.’’


Enter The Glass Infrastructure screenmedia network
Visitors can explore (and often play with) dozens of live project demos throughout the MIT Media Lab and discuss them with the researchers. It can be overwhelming to organize and remember what you have seen.

A key goal is to provide an augmented experience for Lab exploration. Visitors can access project information and multimedia on demand. The Glass Infrastructure also enables visitors to remember what they saw and recommends what projects they might want to see next.

The Glass Infrastructure screenmedia network is comprised of:

• Thirty 40-inch, high-definition, touchscreen-enabled LCD flat screens donated by Samsung
• RFID readers donated by ThingMagic
• Mac Mini controllers
• Front- and back-end software developed by the project team to control the screen user interface, content and status; manages the identification and location of RFID/users; manages the Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine and APIs for accessing lab projects; and provides real-time analytics.
• RFID embedded badges are worn by visitors. Lab students and staff have RFID-chipped smart cards which can be carried in wallets and purses.

The Glass Infrastructure is all about personalized interactivity

• Most of these large LCD touchscreens can be found near the main entrances of the seven large lab spaces, others near elevators or lobbies. Each has an RFID reader attached.

• When visitors come within 5-10 feet of the screen, the reader recognizes them. Each visitor’s photo-icon pops up at the bottom of the flat screen, where photo-icons for all the other visitors currently being identified by the network are also shown.

• A visitor can choose to “log in” by simply touching his/her own icon. A “portfolio” area for that visitor will pop up at the bottom of the screen. The person’s name, photo and affiliation are displayed, along with a placeholder offering that visitor’s items of interests.

• Each touchscreen has a directory-like explorer interface that showcases the research projects located nearby. Visitors can browse by group and by project, and then touch the “Launch” button to view multimedia and other presentation material on Media Lab projects that interest them. By sorting the projects by proximity, more relevant projects are displayed so that the visitors will be incentivized to visit different screens and explore other projects.

• Projects can be collected in their portfolio; items of interest can be bookmarked; information can be collected in advance of the next visit; a "More Like This" button is offered for suggestions.

The network encourages visitors to talk and socialize
More than one visitor can log in at the same screen. All of the portfolios of those visitors appear on the screen at the same time. The group is thus encouraged to see who has collected which items and to engage in fruitful group discussions. In this “social/collaborative mode,” people can drag and exchange items among their portfolios and can explore projects together.

The Glass Infrastructure also includes the “Leader board,” a real-time “mash-up” application that is deployed on two large screens (more than 70”) to help people visualize what’s happening inside the building.

If a visitor to the MIT Media Lab wants to review her Glass Infrastructure experience after leaving, she can log on to a website to review the information she collected during her visit. The website also can remind her who she met at the Media Lab, and help her to contact those people via E-mail: forgotten business cards a problem of the past.

Though visitors who carry RFID badges enjoy a richer media experience from the Glass Infrastructure, the screenmedia system still enables casual visitors of the MIT Media Lab to interact with the screens to explore projects. These RFID-less visitors simply won’t have access to a personal portfolio for information organization and transfer to their own laptop.

Bill Collins is principal of DecisionPoint Media Insights, which produces custom research and consulting on digital screenmedia networks that are deployed at retail and out of home.
Collins can be reached at bill@decisionpointmedia.com.

Issue #246 | Aug 12, 2010 | by Andy Kowl

The announcement by Impinj last month that they are introducing a new Indy R500 chip had more to it than meets the eye.

One tip off this is not the usual market announcement is the product number itself. Usually bigger everything is the norm in product releases.

Dropping your product's version number backwards—not so much.

When Impinj improved the R1000 reader-chip they purchased from Intel nearly four years ago, they called it the R2000, as you would expect. Now we have the R500. The lower number alone makes a strong statement. This is clearly a case where the manufacturer believes less is more. And it may well be.

Way back in RFID Street #97, Erik Wood called Intel's launch of the market's first RFID reader chip a game changer.

As Intel introduced the reader chip in the spring of 2007, Erik wrote having a "Gen 2 reader in a chip could become the single biggest market driver yet. We may never have been able to fully realize the promise of Gen 2 RFID without these new reader chips.

"This promises to be the path to a whole new paradigm shift in applications for Gen 2 technology," he concluded The chip's success proved his point. In fact, you will see below he predicted the eventual appearance of a chip like the new R500 on the market.

Lower and less
The R500 is intended to serve a specific market. This reader-ship offers a lower range which reads less tags per second. That reflects a move from serving early adopters to offering the now-entrenched marketplace the ability to fine-tune Gen 2 RFID's use for more refined applications.

Sharing a common architecture with all members of the Indy reader chip product line, the R500 is drop-in compatible with the high performance Indy R2000. The common architecture reduces design and implementation costs for OEMs.

The reason for the R500 more restricted capability is to serve such uses as empowering lower end handhelds, closer in size to a cell phone of a TV remote. By reducing the range up to about 4m, the power can even be "dialed down" to not energize passive tags a certain distance from the reader. This makes it ideal for certain access control situations.

For example, a growing area in UHF RFID usage is file tracking. The types of stories we have run mostly involve tracking important files through environments like a law office. I remember presenting a webinar on this with Scot Stelter, who is now Impinj senior director of product marketing.

With the R500, you can now add such usage "as a paralegal checking folders in and out of the office library," according to Scot.

The most important differential here is the potential this toned-down chip has for embedded RFID applications. We have long predicted here on Switchboard that embedded will, in the long run, be the most pervasive use of RFID of all. This serves that market, by making the cost come down as well.

Will an old Matrics what-if come true?
In that original column, the aforementioned Erik Wood told this story:

Brainstorming (this) back then with the Matrics founders, we came up with a “what if” market application that would be truly, totally disruptive – nothing to do with the original inventory control question, really.

What if there was a reader, small enough and cheap enough to fit in a PC disk drive and DVD players, which would be able to validate the authenticity of the disk and the software or data on board?

Got it? You have the reader chip built within, say, the DVD reader. Then each time you insert a DVD containing a built-in, low cost passive tag, if it were not properly identified with the right encryption technology it would not play.

Could this end the era of piracy?
At current levels (2007), estimates of lost music sales on CD’s and movies on easily replicated DVD’s, tops $1.6 billion in lost sales annually. This does not include internet downloads. Put on those green eye shades and figure out what the disc sales lost to counterfeiting cost directly, and in the degradation of the distribution network. How many tens of millions of dollars, from the lost billions, would have kept Tower Records in business?

Okay, Marketplace, there you have a challenge. RFID embedded into products will undoubtedly be a prime driver. Regardless of what chips you use, let's see more valuable, non-gimmicky RFID apps in the consumer world.

Issue #244 | July 15, 2010 | by Andy Kowl

Successful, market leading corporations – especially those that cater to the tech-obsessed youth culture – must not just stay on top of the latest technology trends, they must try and keep a step ahead.

Don't they?

When a major corporation decides to bring new technology to a highly visible, trendy, consumer market, it takes exhaustive research and astute strategic planning.

Doesn't it?

Not if you use the leading, nearly-monopolistic U.S. concert promotion company as a benchmark.

What in the world would prompt a company to pass off an already dated, soon-to-be-abandoned technology, as a new innovation? How many executives did it take to make this decision?

Ticketmaster is far and away the market leader in ticket distribution for live events, including sports, theater and other productions. After merging with Live Nation, America's leading concert producer, they dominate ticket distribution for concerts, especially the big arena shows like Springsteen, U2 and Black Eyed Peas.

Their influence over the marketplace is not always used for good purposes, as a recent ticket-diversion scandal proved. Congressional hearings were held.

Now Ticketmaster is about to unveil a lame, cumbersome, inconvenient procedure that gives a bad name to "paperless ticketing." As RFID technology, especially in its near field (NFC) format, has moved paperless ticketing squarely into the 21sr Century, Ticketmaster is firmly planting itself in the last millennium.

In their system, ticket buyers receive no ticket at all, paper or electronic. They are simply required to bring the credit card which paid for the tickets to the show, along with photo ID. Swiping your credit card gets you into the show. This description is from an article in the Washington Post last week. Neither Ticketmaster nor Live Nation returned our calls.

If you buy four tickets for friends, better make plans to meet before the show because only the credit card used will get you in. If someone is caught in traffic, either she does not get into the show or you must miss the start of the show until she arrives.

That's "technology?"

For that you will have to keep your eye on Veritix, a relative upstart launched in 2006. Though they, too, are hampered by current stadium and theater capabilities, CEO Sam Gerace has the company planning for the NFC and RFID future.

Banking on mag strips
As Paul Farhi's article points out about the Ticketmaster plan, "the inability to pass along a seat creates what's become known in the industry as the 'grandma' problem. Since a paperless ticket buyer has to show up at the door . . . It's almost impossible for a grandma living (across) the country to buy a paperless ticket as a gift." Worse, "if the person who bought the tickets on the group's behalf fails to show for some reason," nobody gets in.

Live music is by far my favorite leisure pastime. I've probably seen more than a thousand shows of every kind and can assure you this idiotic scheme will cause mayhem. Veritix has solved the non-transference issue, which I'll cover next week in this two-part overview of ticketing technologies. Maybe someone will forward it to Ticketmaster.

First of all, the mag-strip's days are numbered.

For at least a decade, Visa and MasterCard have been trying to break down the cultural barrier in the U.S. against using chipped credit cards. Smart cards are the primary credit cards now issued in Europe and increasingly in Asia. They are far more secure than the ancient magnetic strip on most American credit cards – those same cards which account for millions of stolen identities each year.

Finally the credit card issuers are making inroads into U.S. adoption of smart cards. Just check the contactless card readers already in place in every single McDonald's, CVS and 7-11 in the country.

In April, Apple also put in their bid for this market. They applied for an electronic ticket patent, according to Near Field Communications World.

By distributing through iTunes, buyers not only get their ticket, but "an enhanced entertainment service," according to editor Sarah Clark. "For instance (they could) automatically receive a live recording of the concert . . . and benefit from special offers on refreshments and merchandise on sale at the venue."

We have been writing for years about tickets moving onto your wireless phone and elsewhere via NFC technology. That is already happening. Next week we will include a round-up of some of the successful and growing use of paperless ticketing that is actually convenient for the user, instead of just for the issuer of tickets.

Issue #243 | July 8, 2010 | by Bill Collins

Identity Group, a static and digital signage company in Cookeville, Tennessee, has developed a digital "wayfinding system," not yet named or formally introduced, based on passive RFID technology.

This “automated passive wayfinding system” is targeted at the hospital market. It was demonstrated publicly for the first time at the Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD) conference held last month.

“When we did our research, we found that medical institutions are prone to growth by additions, making navigation of their facilities one of their biggest problems.” Ravi Venkataraman, executive vice president, explained.

He pointed out the biggest users of hospitals and medical facilities are older people, who tend not to use active electronic devices such as self-service kiosks and mobile phones which can provide directions.

Identity Group had been monitoring RFID technology maturation for several years before jumping in. Venkataraman said they decided to begin developing the company’s patent-pending passive wayfinding system when the antenna technology for passive RFID improved its signal range so hospital badges could be detected at a distance of five or more meters away.

Here’s how the wayfinding system functions:

• Entering a hospital, the front desk gives each visitor an ID badge which contains a small RFID chip. Optionally, the ID badge could be issued by a self-service kiosk or could be shipped by postal mail to the hospital visitor or outpatient prior to their visit.

• During the check-in process, the visitor discloses which clinic or office s/he plans to visit on the hospital campus. That information is then stored in the system’s database.

• As the visitor walks through the hospital, their ID badge is detected by a series of ceiling-mounted RFID antennas (approx 1.5 x 10 inches) which face down towards the hospital corridors at a 45-degree angle. The antennas detect a visitor’s badge within 5-8 meters.

• As the visitor approaches the digital sign, RFID triggers the text-and-arrow-based information changes the content on the signage, pointing the visitor towards their destination. These keep a moving flow at key decision points and potential bottlenecks, such as intersecting hallways.

The RFID-based system complements existing static signage
The beauty of this RFID-based wayfinding system is that its typefaces, enclosure materials and enclosure design colors integrate unobtrusively with the static signage. The integrity of the hospital's corporate branding is maintained even while displaying RFID-prompted messages.

After the visitors heed the directions and moves on down the corridor towards their destination, the sign they just passed erases those directions and provides the simple, arrow-based directions to the next visitor who approaches. During intervals between visitors the digital sign reverts to a “default” mode, where it provides directions to destinations such cafeteria and restrooms, or other messages programmed in.

System handles detours and multiple languages
Because the RFID-based digital wayfinding signage is configured in real time to assist individual hospital visitors, the system can communicate its text directions in a visitor’s preferred language (English, Spanish, Arabic, etc.) The arrow symbols are conveniently universal, understood in any language.

At hospitals, where demolition and construction is an ongoing fact of life, the system can revise its automatically generated directions so that it detours visitors away from the safety hazards that are found in and around construction sites.

According to Tim Thomas, executive vice president of marketing at Identity Group, “We are not aware of any RFID-based wayfinding systems in the marketplace which provide wayfinding services to the widest range of hospital visitors at pennies per user.” Thomas said that the existing RFID-based wayfinding systems they uncovered during development focused on assisting blind and visually impaired individuals.

The company decided to use passive, UHF RFID, rather than active RFID technology, to keep the cost of one ID badge down to approximately one dollar ($US1). It also avoided the need for an on-board electric power source to be periodically replaced on the ID badges.

Active RFID is better suited for other applications such as real-time locating systems (RTLS). More and more hospitals use RTLS systems to geo-track expensive medical-diagnostic tools and other equipment that staff members wheel around the hospital on mobile carts.

Digital signage for hotels, corporate campuses and more
The new hospital signagesystem is a good addition to growing use of RFID in wayfinding systems. With other versions in use at places as disparate as Dollywood, Vail Ski Resorts, conferences and trade shows, construction sites and even casinos, there has still been no breakthrough, whiz-bang, game-changing combination of signage and RFID's location visibility. To accelerate growth of this powerful combination.

Those of us in the digital signage and screenmedia networks business are approaching this technology marriage cautiously. Please take this as an invitation to reach out to our industry. Maybe a digital signage innovator near you, and let's take this to the next level.

Bill Collins is principal of DecisionPoint Media Insights, which produces custom research and consulting on digital screenmedia networks that are deployed at retail and out of home.
Collins can be reached at bill@decisionpointmedia.com.

Issue #242 | June 24, 2010 | by Farida Ali

Everyone knows being around sick people is not good for your health. That is why the incidence of healthcare-associated infections (HAI) in hospitals has always been a great concern.

The Centers for Disease Control estimate deaths from HAI at nearly 100,000 per year in the United States. That makes HAI a top 10 leading cause of death in America. Though most are not fatal, HAIs affect 7-10% of hospitalized patients, according to University of Virginia researchers.

Increasingly, these infections are being caused by pathogens that are resistant to standard antibiotics, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

“A 200-bed hospital incurs $1,779,283 in annual MRSA infection–related expenses attributable to hand hygiene noncompliance," according to the physicians at Duke University and Wayne State University who authored a 2010 report estimating actual MRSA-related dollar costs.

"A one per-cent increase in hand hygiene compliance resulted in annual savings of $39,650 to a 200-bed hospital," the report said. A 5% improvement in compliance thus could save a hospital nearly $200,000 a year.

Despite the studies and statistics, hand hygiene adherence is around 50% in the best of cases. A year-long pilot we've been running in Miami is showing RFID can contribute to increased compliance.

Most hand hygiene efforts among healthcare workers have centered on reminding workers to wash their hands. Internal posters and memos have been supplemented by increased hand-cleaning stations.

“The solution comes down to trying to instill behavioral change in health care workers,” according to Dr. Keith Kaye, co-author of the Duke-Wayne State study on hospital infection rates.

“They don’t want to hurt patients, but they are busy and multitasking. If hand hygiene practices are not ingrained and do not prompt an automatic reaction to reach for the hand sanitizer, they aren’t going to happen.”

Helping to shift the healthcare culture
Kaye believes a major cultural shift among healthcare workers is essential if technology is to succeed. He advises that leadership from hospital or local-unit staff is needed if people are to be held to standards.

The World Health Organization guidelines that define key times healthcare workers should wash their hands or use alcohol-based hand rubs from dispensers.

1. Before touching a patient

2. Before clean/aseptic procedures

3. After body-fluid exposure or risk

4. After touching a patient

5. After touching patient surroundings

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of medicine conducted a study which suggested that electronic monitoring of hand-hygiene improved compliance and decrease HAI rates. They monitored and tracked hand-washing by physicians, nurses, nursing support personnel, ancillary staff, visitors and family members in the intermediate care unit.

Combining RFID and IR to create a solution
The most advanced and potentially most impactful electronic monitoring system is an automated interactive monitoring technology currently being tested by the University of Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital in Florida. Our team at Dynamic Computer Corporation developed the solution which is proving how RFID and infrared (IR) technology can be used to reduce HAI.

Jackson Memorial has launched a pilot study in which volunteer staff members are wearing battery-powered tags on their wrists or around their necks. These tags contain an RFID chip that identifies the employee by name along with an infrared chip that communicates with sensors in hand-sanitizing dispensers.

When an employee presses the dispenser, it scans for an IR signal and captures the employee’s ID number. The RFID tag then transmits the badge’s ID number, date, time and location to a reader. Software interprets the data to confirm that the individual sanitized his or her hands.

The system measures the time between hand-cleaning and arrival at a patient’s bed, where another sensor detects the caregiver’s presence. Employees who have not sanitized their hands receive a voice alert, requesting them to do so.

The pilot program has been in operation since July of last year and currently is being evaluated and fine-tuned by Dynamic. Results are showing us this RFID/IR solution will typically return a hospital’s investment within a year.

Dr. Kaye of Wayne State notes that RFID devices can capture many more observations than human monitoring can. “It’s objective and more precise because the numbers are bigger. Its data you can take at face value. Having that sort of health-care-worker-compliance data and feeding it back to providers, benchmarking it against colleagues, can be a very powerful tool. When these devices are demonstrated to be effective, functional and affordable, I hope there will be more rapid buy-in to these kinds of systems.”

While the new technology is showing great promise, Kaye points out that technology by itself is not likely to improve hand hygiene. “It’s what you do with the data. . . People need to be held accountable,” he adds. "In health care, no one will drop dead immediately if a worker doesn’t wash her hands.”

Using technology to encourage hand-hygiene compliance requires a leap in institutional culture. Results certainly will be most effective when institutional change is integrated with appropriate technology budgets. RFID and IR technology testing has produced exceptional improvements in efficiency, productivity and accuracy. This can provide the significant overall cost savings shown in the studies.

Farida Ali is the president of Dynamic Computer Corporation, of Farmington Hills, Mich., a full-scale IT procurement services and RFID system solution provider. www.dcc-online.com

Issue #241 | June 17, 2010 | by Douglas Bellin

One of the issues when adding RFID to a company’s portfolio of technologies is the sheer number of data points that will be added.

In a typical IT environment you have multiple systems that have to be maintained, managed and updated. These could include ERP, MES, HR, Time and Attendance and countless more. Add to this complexity Security, Storage, Servers, and the overall network itself.

Now add another layer of complexity—since most companies also have silos of information across Process, Organization and Technology. Too many times I've seen companies try to downplay the massive structure they currently have and just trust it works. They already have an ERP system and feel that this is enough to run their business.

Add new RFID functionality on top of this, and you are getting a wealth of data which now must be added to what already exists. What do you do with this gateway to the "internet of things?" Are you going to drown in the new data?

Smart CIO's make sure the goal of Enterprise Architecture is successfully accomplished by having a baseline infrastructure in place. This prevents any amount of additional data that needs to run on top of this is from becoming "the spaghetti of things."

Business building blocks
Most business units within a company do not talk with IT. They see IT as a hindrance instead of understanding that they are enablers, a resource they can use to enhance the value they, themselves, are trying to add.

The net result is the CIO may not see all that is occurring with the business when the business managers are not including the IT department in the decision process.

Think of good Enterprise Architecture as the foundation of a house built with Lego's. Once that foundation is built you can easily add additional blocks – services, applications, RFID and more – and enhance the information that you already have.

When you look at the various silos of information you have, each has a distinct value to the company. If not, they wouldn't exist. If you could break down the silos of information, look at the data that already exists, then start to ‘mash’ all this data together, you add multipliers to the value of the data which will help drive value to the business.

Making 'Location' a multiplier
Let's take Location as a data point. If you combine Location with the other systems that exist like HR, Time and Attendance and Task Management, you start to see additional value. These other systems currently provide a known, therefore static, value. Your new data point enhances their value, making it no longer static.

Example: an employee starts his day by walking back to the time clock and clocking in. He then goes off to see what he is tasked to do for the day. During the day he may have additional tasks given to him, normally from a central point that he has to go to and pick up the new task and then head back out to work. This could easily be improved.

If the employee has an active RFID badge, upon arriving he is automatically logged into the time and attendance system. If this employee has a company PC, wireless phone or other mobile device, you can send tasks automatically to this device.

During the day, depending upon where the employee is within the facility, you can also send updates to their tasks which they can retrieve closer to the location that they are currently at. This eliminates the time wasted by heading back to the central location to receive instructions before going to the next location and the next task.

The addition of information on location adds a distinct value to the existing data, in this case the time and attendance and task management information. By eliminating the down times you are able to increase productivity.

Fitting the Lego blocks together
Once this base infrastructure is in place the company can quickly and seamlessly provision new services, new upgrades and new features to the users. Today this is normally completed with the use of downtime of the systems, but by putting these offerings out onto the network you do not need downtime to provision new features, functionality and versions.

By increasing the benefit of cross-silo communication and analysis you will truly gain new value from the systems that are in place, and can add future systems seamlessly. We know what we have today and we should have a roadmap to what we are adding in the near future, be it RFID or other systems. By implementing a strong and stable base it will not matter what the next big thing is.

To be prepared and avoid the spaghetti from gumming up your control, you must plan properly. By mashing this information together, these new data points become meaningful and actionable business metrics and you will not be overwhelmed by data.

In fact, the opposite could be true. You will be reacting to the data that has an issue, not the issue of data.

Douglas Bellin is Industry Lead for Cisco Systems, based in Singapore. He is responsible for working with customers to use technology to solve business issues in various marketplaces. dobellin@cisco.com

Issue #240 | June 10, 2010 | by Marco Ruocco

The interfacing of the digital world of the internet and ITC (Information and TeleCommunications) with the geographical world of location-based services, navigation devices and contextual information delivery surfaced as a trend that at CeBIT2010 this past March.

This interfacing presents interesting implications for digital signage and kiosks, in that they will play a role as technological vehicles for this geo-convergence.

Technological convergence
From an ITC perspective, convergence is based on interoperability and standardization. In the mobile world, convergence counteracts the proliferation of platforms and standards that tend to disperse development resources.

Digital signage and kiosk manufacturers (OEM hardware producers and system integrators) use flexible design to accommodate specific applications, sometimes combining multiple technologies.

However, convergence can be found not only at product level but also in the environment in which the product is deployed. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany presented its new personal medication-management concept kiosk, Browser.

Browser can identify the ID card of the person, recognize a series of medications in a specific packaging and advise about their side effects when combined with conflicting items placed on the RFID reader tray.

Kiosk applications such as Browser, which assist users in relation to environmental context and user profiles, are examples of convergence on non-technical issues.

Our surrounding environment of places and objects is becoming progressively represented in digital form, and new display and interaction devices are needed for this purpose. Tag-based identification via RFID, NFC and QR-Code is becoming a widespread method for reading data.

Computer vision offers an alternative to this approach. NICTA, an Australian research institute, presented research showing how cameras mounted on a moving car can recognize street signs by comparing recorded images with a stored picture model, at a computational cost suitable for mobile devices, for developing maps of street signs in new areas.

GPS-enabled mobile convergence
Mobile companies are progressively seeking the integration of the internet with the geographical world, based on location, navigation and assisted interaction with the environment. GPS-enabled smartphones are widely seen by the industry as the vehicles for this convergence.

Applications like Aura, a navigation software introduced by Sygic and available on multiple platforms, is based on the concept of integration of personal data with the navigation-centered interaction with the geographical world. The maps are enhanced by approximate 3D building shapes, a first step in incorporating the visual landscape in navigation, and there is support for shared place-voting mechanisms.

According to Marius Preda, professor at the France-based Telecom & Management institute, the digital-geographical world interface has to be built by the community with the help of proper development tools accessible to non-experts. Their Totem project aims at supporting gaming on mobile, based on communication controlling 3D graphics.

Digital becoming geographic
The digital world is becoming less autonomous. According to the Cloud-computing concept, computing resources and services are being progressively transferred onto the Web and dematerialized from offices and homes.

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, in the opening keynote of the Global Conferences series, described the growth of this large-scale virtualization approach. He also indicated that the growing Cloud needs to reflect the subdivisions of the geographical world, such as country-specific laws and regulations.

The current approach to large-scale systems is confronted with a similar issue. IBM's Vice President of Marketing and Communication, Jon Iwata, reported in another keynote speech the new scenario of ubiquitous and fast-increasing presence of interconnected sensing and control devices supporting human activity and requiring a complex management.

"Smarter Planet" also means that ITC is deeply intertwined with the geographical world, a trend that pairs with Green-IT in defining new market approaches. An example is the smaller-scale "smarter cities" project, TagMyLagoon. Developed by IBM, France-based Neotilus and the City of Venice, the projects allows pedestrian traffic in peripheral areas of the city to be directed by QR-Code tags read by tourists with mobile phones.

Digital signage in context
While mobile is becoming the main platform of this convergence, limitations such as screen size and security concerns may require a managed infrastructure of support deployed in fixed locations. This is where digital signage and kiosk applications may play an important role. Factors like their defined geographical location, their hardware and display capabilities, their approach to contextualized and timed presentation of information, and the incorporation in kiosks of new technologies for object identification, all make them suitable vehicles for the digital-geographic convergence.

The challenge seems not so much on the technical side but on developing concepts specifically reflecting the complexity of the geographical world and of our interactions with it.

Marco Ruocco a freelance writer based in Milan, Italy, filed this report to Kiosk Marketplace, who we thank for this information. www.kioskmarketplace.com