Magazine Uses RFID Tags to Connect to Internet

I think people need to be fully aware of the implications of RFID technology. I am a digital strategist myself, and I am telling you this is not the innocent funky gadget it is being proported to be; this is your Orwellian nightmare and people need to wake up. http://rfid.deandonaldson.com

One wonders exactly what color the sky is in their world. Print publications have tried for years to replace the ten-second act of reading a printed URL and typing it into your browser -- with uniformly disastrous results. Originally, it was with printed bar codes alongside the regular URL. This cost nothing extra in the magazine or newspaper's print cost, but they somehow neglected the fact that less than 1 in 500 of their readers owned a suitable bar code scanner attached to their computer. And, in THAT microscopic group, they still had to cut and paste the decoded URL from their bar code scanner software (or a word-processing program, which some bar code scanners could send to) into a browser window's URL, since few bar code scanner / browser plug-ins existed. Bar code scanners are cheaper now, but still cost $70 and up -- don't plan on them making a big break into the broad consumer marketplace anytime soon. RFID is a handy technology for tracking missing or stolen items, since an RFID chip, at a few millimeters across is easily hidden and can last for years. But trying this with RFID, however, is a MUCH dumber idea for print publishers. Even in huge quantities, RFID chips cost a few pennies each, and you'd want one per ad or story link in a print magazine or newspaper. Count up the number of URLs in ads and stories in any current newspaper or magazine issue. Even with just 20 RFID link chips in a copy, the print cost (especially for newspapers) could be doubled or quadrupled. Oh, and let's not forget the RFID scanner every reader would need attached to his computer via BlueTooth or USB. Plan on spending about $400 and up for one of those right now -- more than an entire netbook computer costs at the moment. Even if, with mass production, they could be reduced to $70, like the cheaper bar code scanners, they STILL will never make the big-time. All of this technological flailing to replace the daunting 10-second task of typing in a URL you read on a page. What a sad joke. Print publishers (and their advertisers) are desperate to be relevant in the web era, but let's try and hold on to some tiny shred of reality here. If you want a look at a more viable approach, consider the pen-format OCR scanners out there by several manufacturers. They can read a normal printed URL and either store it or sent it to a computer by USB or BlueTooth. LiveSribe is a good example (www.livescribe.com), and, while it's still too expensive at a base price of $150, a greatly stripped-down version capable of storing hundreds of URLS could likely be mass-produced for a retail price point under $40. That -- perhaps -- would have a chance to make this concept workable. Bob Atkinson, Technology Lead Sabatier Consulting