Jason O’Grady’s Blog

VeriChip, maker of subcutaneous RFID tags used to unlock doors or identify people, gets preliminary nod from FDA. (CNet’s News.com)

The Philadelphia Eagles NFL franchise is allowing fans to purchase beer, food and other items at the new Lincoln Financial Field via RFID tags. The tags allow you to swipe them against a reader shortening the amount of time spent waiting for your beer. Nirvana will occur when *other* retail establishements begin accepting the PowerPay tag. Hey, I really like the name too! Click on the link to find out more and read about how they are embedding the RFID tags into credit cards too…

In an article full of really bad jokes ZDNet announced that Digital Angel, under a grant from the Portuguese government is undertaking a plan to implant RFID tags in all of it’s dogs by 2007. The dogs will be tagged and entered into a national canine database. We’re not quite sure how tagging a dog will help to control rabies, unless it’s used to punish the owner of the dog for letting it get rabies in the first place. Why not just give all dogs rabies vaccinations while they’re implanting the RFID tags if they really want to control rabies? They also claim that the next generation of tags should be able to take the animal’s temperature to aid in determining if it’s sick. (Thanks Engadget)

From Josh McHugh’s excellent article from Wired 12.17 “Attention, Shoppers: You Can Now Speed Straight Through Checkout Lines!”

I’m in a supermarket called the Extra Future Store in Rheinberg, Germany, 40 kilometers north of Düsseldorf, jonesing for a bit of Philadelphia cream cheese. I feed my request into the touchscreen console on my shopping cart, and up pops a map showing the optimal path to the dairy section. I steer over and grab a box - regular in name but far smarter than the average cream cheese. The package carries a computer chip that talks to a 2-millimeter-thin pad lining the shelf under the box. When I pick up the cheese, sensors in the pad notify the store’s database that the box has been removed. I exchange the plain for the mit Kräuter (with herbs) then, wracked with indecision, snag the low-fat version. It turns out it’s not really all that low-fat anyhow, so I put it back down. My waffling will produce a flurry of data back at Kraft Foods headquarters. The company, which gets this information in return for subsidizing the smart shelf and the microchips attached to the packages, will use the data to analyze my behavior. The marketing department will likely draw some kind of conclusion from my skittishness - a hint that maybe “low-fatness” is too Spartan a theme for a hedonistic schmear anyway. Of course, they’ll also have serious insight into my personal shopping habits.

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