RFID: From Fish to Flowerpots

On Track Innovations has just supplied 1.5 million RFID cards to the Warsaw Transport Department in Poland. VeriFone has just taken an order for 20,000 readers for the Australian Cabcharge taxi payment cards. Digital Angel has also received this level of order but for readers in U.S. rivers to monitor fish. Vuance has taken a $6.2 million service contract for its RFID secure access in a European airport. The list goes on and the breadth of application is truly remarkable.

At Europe's leading conference on the subject, "RFID Europe" in Cambridge UK, Sept 30 - Oct 1, the full breadth of the subject will be revealed by both users and suppliers. For example, Tonny V Graveson, COO of RFID user Container Centralen in Denmark, who will speak at the conference, says:

"The major RFID pilots in Denmark, Holland and Germany we have been running over the last two years show huge advantages in controlling and tracking reusable transport items (RTIs) and, not least, improving operational efficiency. Based on these experiences we are planning to put RFID tags on our 3.5 million flower containers in the European flower industry. Beside this we have had pilots with major retailers in Europe to assess the value of using RFID to track dollies and crates in the supply chain. These pilots have led to a cooperation between LOGIPACK and Container Centralen introducing the floor ready packaging concept to the beer industry in Germany. The concept is based on RFID tagged CC Euro dollies."

Another scoop is the promised presentation by Dr. Erik Jan van Lieshout, a consultant in Internal Medicine and a European board certified critical care physician in the Academic Medical Centre (AMC) of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is head of the Mobile Intensive Care Unit of the AMC and chairman of the Intensive Care Transport Committee of Dutch Society of Intensive Care Medicine. His scientific research focuses on the technical and clinical aspects of IC transport and on mobility in healthcare in general and he will talk on "RFID in the critical care environment: is IT safe?" This is a sensitive topic at the moment.