An interesting announcement from KDDI regarding RFID technology: the Japanese operator is selling a Bluetooth RFID reader which communicates with mobile handsets to relay information from RFID tags. The first deployment is targeted at enterprise and industrial customers, but it is further evidence of the mobile network being extended to a new generation of citizens: physical objects and machines.
This is a macro-trend which I’ve been observing for some time and the pace of adoption is rapidly increasing. It will have huge implications for the user experience as the industry struggles to understand how to enable effective person-to-person and person-to-machine communication in the same device.
Mirren Fischer is someone who finds herself at the confluence of some really big challenges:…
Poetry and place...listening and lockdowns... Dan Phillips, who led the Royal College of Art's (RCA)…
Mark Baldino's path to co-founding a Chicago-based design agency wends its way from a degree…
Paul Campbell, a former chief designer at Ford, is now re-imagining the wheelchair at Centaur…
Opening the oven released a cloud of steam. I should have been expecting it. It's…
Jared Ficklin's approach of 'think by making' has led him to produce remarkable digital design…
View Comments
The japanese government has required food manufacturers to place RFID tags on all food partly so that users can access information about the food from their mobile phones.
Professor and author of Mobile Disruption, Tokyo Japan
Thanks for the comment Jeffrey: I didn't realise this was now a government requirement. It is going to be fascinating to see how the mobile experience evolves when handsets can be used to discover information about the world around us, whether that's food or advertising or transport or any other physical object.