eMvoy Blog: What's New in US Manufacturing Competitiveness

If you were thinking of switching your inventory tracking system from bar codes to RFID, you may want to hold off a little while. Something better is in the pipeline.

Today Hewlett-Packard revealed a teeny tiny new digital chip that stores up to 4mb (in current prototypes) and communicates with the outside world via a built in, eensy-weensy-teeny-weeny modem that transfers data at 10 mb per second—faster than a speeding Bluetooth. The chip is small enough (HP says “as small as a grain of rice”, but we prefer to think of it as “as small as two grains of couscous”) to be embedded in paper or on a sticker, and potentially, as storage capacity increases, could hold everything from text to photo to video information.

RFID tags are about the size of a coin, and only carry a code, which is then read by a transceiver and sent to a main computer. The computer then looks up the code and spits out relevant information, whether that’s a revised inventory figure (a warehouse), a bank account to debit (as in commuters’ EZ-passes), or a contact name and address (as under the skin of Zeno, eMvoy’s blogger’s office cat).

Memory Spot could store all that information and more directly on the product or label or animal that has been tagged. For warehouses and manufacturers, information about the product’s entire history—specific information about when and where the product was made (and by whom), what its expiry date is, etc., could be stored on the item itself. We’ll go out on a limb here and speculate that Memory Spot, because it can hold short video clips, photos, or pages of text, could even replace paper instruction manuals or instructional DVDs for products that require set-up or assembly.

Also, unlike RFID, the Memory Spot chips don’t require separate batteries or antennaes—HP estimates that the devices could initially cost about $1 each.

Finally, the boys at The Register note that

“At first glance, the technology sounds like some kind of glorified RFID chip, but there’s a world of difference between storing what is a souped up bar code, and a patient’s entire medical history, which presumably will include quite a lot of rather sensitive ID info.”

Finally, there's a tinfoil hat community of people who are very concerned—or in some cases very excited --about potential sinister Orwellian abuse of RFID. We can only imagine the reaction to the new Memory Spot technology.