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| Subject: Re: Gemplus,concentrate servicesin telecoms and finance | |
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Author: RFID products |
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Date Posted: 20:04:03 01/26/03 Sun In reply to: IDTechEx Limited, 2001. Downing Park Innovation Center, 's message, "Gemplus,concentrate servicesin telecoms and finance" on 20:01:29 01/26/03 Sun showing chip RFID products in other shapes including smart labels and tickets. For instance, it was nice to see the Philips I.Code chip in wrist bands for theme parks etc where they work at one metre range. Previously, most smart wrist bands have worked at only a few centimetres and their applications have been limited. The exhibition was on two floors with about 400 stands and a lot of interested people bumping into each other (over 10 000 in 3 days or so they say) and sweating profusely because of the lack of ventilation - a sort of high tech Dante's inferno. Four companies exhibited microbatteries for smart cards and labels. Philips had a splendid stand illustrating its global successes in chips for smart cards, tickets and labels. These are to the Type A standard in the main, which has been written around Mifare which outsells all other card chips combined. Sensibly, Philips sticks to chips these days and has stopped competing with its customers. However, just about everyone else is concentrating on Type B, if only to break the Philips monopoly. An important aspect of this is the pan-European Calypso development and standard for cards and tickets and various allied initiatives often backed by European Community money to speed adoption of both contactless smart cards and tickets. These are all driven by land transport, so to speak. RFID tickets are the new hot topic and although first sales have only just begun - curiously a few tens of thousands for tolling in Macedonia - the business is already fragmenting. Smart tickets in paper-plastic laminate are used for day tickets, stored value for road tolling etc. ie multiple use then disposal. Here the Mifare Light chip is often offered. The resulting ticket is sold for 20 to 40 cents. For single trip ticketing the new Mifare Ultra Light chip tends to be used or Type B alternatives and paper alone on top. ASK, PAV Card, X-ident and others were demonstrating smart tickets, sometimes in tearoff strips. Most were of the more expensive multiple use design. Sokymat showed the same clarity of marketing as Philips, in this case by concentrating on smart objects alone - no services, interrogators etc. It has paid off with them outselling every- © IDTechEx Limited, 2001. Downing Park Innovation Center, Swaffham Bulbeck, Cambridge, CB5 0NB, UK. Tel: + 44 1223 813703 Fax: + 44 1223 812400 2 one. The new electronic car keys (replacing clickers) are a particularly buoyant market for them. They say their products have superior reliability and tag size and price as a result of their proprietary direct bonding process. The conferences were less successful because the organisers boasted 200 speakers in six parallel sessions competing with several exhibitor seminars so there were never enough listeners to go round up to 10 venues at any one time. I spoke on Smart Objects in the Transport stream and my audience was seven people rising to fifteen at the end. This was in a 300 seat auditorium with projectionist, live interpretation, Chairman and so on! My talk and that of my successors therefore had a certain dream-like quality. Thales, formerly Thomson of France, banged on about how Type B Contactless is the only way to go and ERG of Australia gave a rivetting talk on how they have conquered the world as system integrators of over 10 million contactless smart cards, notably in Hong Kong and Continental Europe. They continue to land splendid orders and remain bullish despite separating from the Motorola joint venture and having a temporary drop in profits and share price. They find that fraud drops to a quarter of its previous level when contactless smart cards replace traditional bus and rail ticketing. There are also steep reductions in maintenance costs: equipment life is extended and queues are reduced. There was a separate session on Smart Objects but this mainly covered work on Bluetooth and new standards, so few attended. The conference proceedings, a bound book, were excellent and anyone wanting a splendid reference volume on smart cards for the next year should buy them. At least the speakers did their bit .... Impressions of Cartes Smart Labels Analyst • Issue 10 • November 2001 cent of all RFID applications are new – nothing is replaced. New earning streams are created, costs reduced, convenience improved. Where an RFID tag replaces something such as a barcode or magnetic stripe, the payback typically comes from: • Lower cost of the system over its life. • Faster throughput. • Less fraud, theft, counterfeiting. Airports a fertile area The greatest variety of needs for smart objects in transport is in airports. We already see passengers carrying a fast track card sensed at a metre. There are some airport gold cards that provide privileges such as reserved parking and loyalty points in shops but these are rarely contactless as yet. Freight and vehicles are often RFID tagged for speed of handling, location, non-stop road tolling and non-stop entry and exit for parking. Assets such as computers are tagged so theft can be proved (evidence in court), they can be returned to the right place and stock taking is made easier. Contactless (RFID) cards are sometimes used for staff access. Road, rail and marine Those applying smart objects to road, rail and marine transport are showing less imagination than airports. Contactless smart cards for transactions and ticketing have been well received with about 20 million in use in Hong Kong plus Korea for intermodal road and rail stored value ticketing, and some multiple uses. After ten years of dithering, Japan National Railways is set to buy 60 million. The largest order for contactless smart cards will be over 500 million for ID of adults in China but that may be 10 years away and transport and travel is only peripherally involved. Meanwhile, city cards in e.g. Pusan City, Korea and Curitiba, Brazil, are primarily travel oriented, administering Smart Objects in Transport Smart objects, specifically Radio Frequency Identification "RFID" tags are already used in rail, road, air and marine transport. They take various forms and solve a great variety of challenges, including: • Security and safety • Logistics • Proof of ownership • Traceability • Anti-counterfeiting • Product handshaking (e.g. auto rejecting unauthorised parts) • Carrying information around and, if necessary, updating it remotely (e.g. warranty, delivery and service records) • Market research / behaviour monitoring • Fast track of passengers • Transactions • Ticketing • Tamper prevention • Theft prevention Making new things possible Frequently, new things are made possible such as covertly recording and updating security status in a baggage tag. Indeed, at Heathrow Airport in the UK, a new service collects your bags and signals to your radio telephone when they have reached your home or hotel. A flat RFID tag known as a smart label is used. Other examples of making new things possible are the vehicle immobiliser "clicker", (it does not replace anything) and the tagging of food and baggage trolleys in airports so they are not stolen or lost. They are repaired correctly and promptly as well. In the average airport 15% of baggage trolleys are "lost" at any one time. Twenty per- "The largest order for contactless smart cards will be over 500 million for ID of adults in China" © IDTechEx Limited, 2001. Downing Park Innovation Center, Swaffham Bulbeck, Cambridge, CB5 0NB, UK. Tel: + 44 1223 813703 Fax: + 44 1223 812400 3 discounts, free travel etc. for certain groups, acting as an electronic purse, etc. About one million citizens in each location will soon have the card. London, Paris etc. are each issuing about 5 million contactless cards for universal bus and train stored value use. Now they seek contactless disposable paper tickets for 10 cents each to sell to occasional users. These will be proven and available in 2002. 15 million vehicles worldwide have non-stop tolling tags in the window and, in China, they are being tested as multipurpose ID, parking, tolling, insurance, tax devices. In the US, the Dallas turnpike card provides non-stop parking in the airport and the city. We expect hundreds of millions of vehicles to be tagged in this way within a few years, particularly now a $5 version is available as an adhesive label (about 10 metre range) from Amtech. The price applies to orders for one million plus. There are strong moves now to make contactless smart cards for buses interoperable across countries and sometimes between countries. However, there is little attempt to copy airports with the other uses of RFID. A big picture hangs over all this – the Massachusetts Institute of Technology "Internet of Things" where all barcodes and more are replaced with one cent smart labels on Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG, assets – even cheap ones, living things etc. This is ten years or more away but tens of trillions of such smart labels may be sold yearly one day and, inter alia, transform the way transport is managed and its cost. IDTechEx has just published a report on Smart Transport: Smart tickets, cards and labels for land, sea and air transport. The report (shortened contents listed opposite) can be purchased from the order form at the back of this issue of Smart Labels Analyst or from: www.idtechex.com Smart Objects in Transport Issue 10 . November 2001 [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |