Barcoding News

Given some of the negative news this year related to the use of radio frequency identification, as well as the decline in capital spending by most businesses, some had predicted the industry might have suffered a devastating blow from which it could not recover. I doubt anyone who attended last week’s RFID Journal LIVE! event in Orlando, Fla., would reach that conclusion today.

Our seventh annual conference and exhibition attracted 2,400 people, which was down a bit from last year’s total of a little more than 3,000. But many people, including exhibitors, feared attendance would be a lot lower, given that many trade shows have been down 50 percent or more due to the challenging economic conditions. They were pleased to see the aisles filled, but they were absolutely thrilled as they engaged in conversations with attendees. Most end users at the event were focused on specific projects with budgets and timelines. They are investing in RFID technology.

Last week, I said I thought RFID had crossed the chasm (see RFID Crosses the Chasm), and LIVE! 2009 confirmed that to be true. Those who attended this year were not visionaries dreaming about how RFID would one day transform the global supply chain. They were businesspeople from a wide range of industries and countries, seeking solutions to common business problems—lost and misplaced assets, inventory inaccuracy, shipping and receiving problems, and so forth.

I spoke to several end users during the free consultations we offered at the event. All had a solid understanding of RFID, and knew it could help them. They sought insights regarding which solution would be best, and wanted to know which vendors they should talk to.

Most applications being considered by attendees were closed-loop. That’s not surprising. Many companies have issues stretching across the supply chain, but it makes sense to tackle issues within their own control. They also seek solutions that can deliver a fast return on investment. Still, these early deployments will lead to additional projects down the road. At a private lunch hosted by ADT, one gentleman told me, “I got all the information I need to move ahead with my project, but I got five or six other ideas of how RFID could really help us.”

The attendees with whom I spoke impressed with the quality of the RFID products being exhibited. Hardware and software products are getting less expensive and easier to deploy. Motorola’s new reader is a case in point—it’s half the size and cost of its predecessor, but also has some great new features, such as built-in indicator lights and power-over-Ethernet, so you don’t have to run power cables to every location in which you want to place a reader.

ODIN Technologies, winner of our second Best in Show award at this year’s RFID Journal Awards ceremony (see Voegele, Vail, FOCUS and ODIN Technologies Win RFID Journal Awards), introduced a very cool self-contained, mobile RFID portal that can be installed in any ISO-standard shipping container in less than a minute. The unit comes with magnets enabling it to be popped into place, and also offers Wi-Fi, cellular and satellite communications capabilities to transmit the RFID data it captures.

In some ways, I think this event was critical to the RFID industry’s continued growth. The business that exhibitors get from attendees will enable them to continue investing in new products and services; without that continued innovation, the industry would stagnate. Next year, I predict that we’ll see even more attendees ready to invest, and I’m sure we’ll also see exhibitors with new, innovative products.

(Original article: http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/view/4841)

BarcodesInc announced today it has achieved Select Certification from Cisco®. The Select Certification recognizes Cisco resale channel partners whose primary focus is on the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market with fewer than 250 employees.

“This partnership offers both Cisco and BarcodesInc an excellent opportunity for growth. We believe that Cisco’s product suite combined with our expertise and customer focus will lead to a more comprehensive offering and improved customer experience for both companies’ clients.” – Amanda Healy Collins, Director of Sales, BarcodesInc

“The Cisco Select Certification was created in response to customer demand for channel partners to be capable of designing and implementing SMB-specific Cisco solutions,” said Surinder Brar, senior director of worldwide channels at Cisco. “With the Select Certification, BarcodesInc has made an investment in obtaining the training, skills and knowledge necessary to play a pivotal role in meeting this increasing demand.”

To earn Select Certification, BarcodesInc fulfilled the training and exam requirements for the SMB Specialization. BarcodesInc also met the personnel, training, and post-sales support requirements set forth by Cisco.

The Cisco Resale Channel Program provides partners with the training required to build sales, technical and Cisco Lifecycle Services skills. Cisco resale partner certifications—Select, Premier, Silver and Gold—represent an increasing breadth of skills across key technologies and a partner’s ability to deliver integrated networking solutions. Cisco resale partner specializations—Entry, Express, Advanced and Master—reflect an increasing depth of sales, technical and service expertise in particular technologies.

About BarcodesInc
BarcodesInc is North America’s leading provider of barcoding, mobile computing, and RFID solutions. Over the past fifteen years, we have worked hard to earn a reputation for being dedicated, reliable, and customer-oriented. Additionally, we are product experts with deep experience in field mobility, inventory and point-of-sale solutions.

Cisco, Cisco Systems and the Cisco logo are registered trademarks of Cisco Systems Inc. in the United States and certain other countries.

Radio Frequency Identification, which is better known as RFID, can be translated as the use of radio frequencies to read and transmit information through the use of small devices called tags. These are currently being used by healthcare organizations in order to tackle new challenges.

Such challenges are “operational efficiency, patient safety, and improvement of the business processes”, declares one of the TechNavio experts. In fact, healthcare providers and payers, including patients, “are transforming the usage of RFID from technology that is used to reduce costs to facilitating, automating, and streamlining identification processes.”

Healthcare organizations, including hospitals, nursing homes, home healthcare facilities, health maintenance organizations, laboratories, clinics, physician offices, and pharmacies situated within hospitals, form the cumulative healthcare industry in the report, which has recently been published by TechNavio Insights.

According to the report “RFID in Healthcare industry 2008-2012, by 2012”, “the market for RFID tags in healthcare industry is expected to reach $153.2 million driven by the development of lower cost tags and installed infrastructure, which will enable high volumes of articles to be tagged.”

(Original article: http://marketpublishers.com/lists/4538/news.html)

Microscan, a global technology leader for precision data acquisition and control solutions, announces the new Visionscape® Smart Camera that combines technologies from machine vision and auto ID into a singular PCB inspection solution that is powerful, low-cost, and easy to use.

The Visionscape® Smart Camera can perform as a cost-effective alternative for inspecting boards for misaligned or missing high-value components and connectors, such as heavy or odd-shaped connectors with a high misplacement rate. A single Visionscape® Smart Camera positioned over a conveyor or bench top can verify the accuracy of components and placement, or alternatively identify any errors prior to reflow. More cost-effective than AOI, this quick and simple quality inspection checkpoint enables savings, quality assurance, and line throughput.

The Visionscape® Smart Camera series combines a compact form factor with the broad applicability, versatility and proven performance of Visionscape® machine vision software. Designed for use in a range of applications, the Visionscape® Smart Camera provides a cost-effective, easily deployed solution for manufacturers to monitor quality, control processes, or identify and trace parts on production lines.

As a flexible solution, Visionscape ® Smart Cameras can be used for quality inspection, device metrology inspection, and full traceability. They stand alone in their support of Track, Trace, and Control processes with full blown optical character recognition (OCR), optical character verification (OCV), and full reading of any barcodes or 2D symbols including the most difficult direct part marks (DPM). The advanced technology used in this system includes high-end machine vision algorithms and state-of-the-art high-speed multi-core dual processor smart camera technology. This fast and powerful system is not only simple and easy to use, program, and operate, but also totally transportable across a wide variety of applications throughout the factory – all at a fraction of the cost of traditional AOI solutions.

As a portable one-piece unit, the Visionscape® Smart Camera is easy to handle for placement and install in over-the-belt or bench top inspection applications. Any job changeovers can be done quickly through user-friendly software. With a solid-state design and no moving parts, no maintenance is required.

Adding Track, Trace and Control can improve outbound product quality by several percentage points simply by catching potential problems before it is too late. The built-in communication protocols and I/O features make this system a snap to interface with any PLC, PC-based, or networked MES system currently in use within the factory.

When the new Dallas Cowboys football stadium opens in June, it may not only be the largest sports stadium in the world, but also the one with the most technological innovations.

Three million square feet is a lot of stadium, and 1.1 billion dollars is a lot of money, but part of what will make this new stadium shine is the technology that has been built into it. Jerry Jones, the owner of the team, is high on technology. Pete Walsh, head of technology for the Cowboys, says “I was given a blank sheet of paper and told to go create the future.”

Walsh took that directive literally and has created a tech marvel in the heart of Texas. When fans attend a game at the new stadium, they will be able to e-mail photos to friends, find lost children, cash in wireless coupons and watch customized content on the thousands of televisions, according to a Dallas News story. That’s a far cry from the limited technology that was available at the Cowboy’s previous, 37-year-old facility.

Walsh says, “Texas Stadium doesn’t have a whole lot of technology in it. Basically, you flip on the lights and roll out the football. In the new stadium, almost everything is tied to technology and to a computer.” Here are some of the innovations in the new stadium:

* The stadium will sport two 60 yard video monitors above the field.
* They will be among the 2800 monitors installed in the stadium, every one of which will have its own IP address.
* Stadium personnel can put any available video stream on any monitor at any time, via computer control.
* When complete, parents and stadium security will be able to track children via RFID.
* That same RFID system could help keep track of team property, and keep it from being removed from the stadium.
* Thirty antennae are spread throughout the stadium to insure good telephone and WiFi inside the facility.

Even if the team does not perform, the stadium will. Although most of us do not often think about it, there is a lot of technology packed into almost everything that is being built these days. There is no reason that stadiums should be any different. This new facility will give other team owners another way in which they need to keep up with the Jones’.

 

The 2009 HIMSS Exhibition featured more than 900 exhibiting companies and health informatics-related organizations. Despite a stormy economy, many vendors reached networking milestones and experienced increased interest in certain products due to the stimulating effect of the federal stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

Overall attendance at the 2009 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition was down a little more than five percent this year from 2008. Many exhibitors noticed the difference, including Gail Malcolm, HIMSS fellow and marketing manager for Siemens’ Image and Knowledge Management Division.

“We’re really seeing the economic impact this year,” said Malcolm, “We certainly don’t see the number of attendees that we have in the past, and a lot of vendors are cutting back on their staff. Everyone is trying to tighten the belt and for a lot of customers, the funding for travel has just been eliminated.”

But despite fewer numbers, business was still booming due to the expected influx of funding from the recent Health IT stimulus bill.

“We’ve seen leads triple since the ARRA,” said Lynne Durham, senior public relations officer for Sage Software. “Our industry is affected a lot less than other industries in large part because of the stimulus act.”

Newer companies also experienced milestones, like Aruba Wireless Networks, which offers network integration solutions for health care centers. Since 2003 the company has secured 25 percent of the market for network integration and was flush with activity at HIMSS.

“We did better in the first few hours on Sunday than we did the entire HIMSS conference last year,” said Manav Khurana, head of marketing for Aruba Wireless Networks.

Products for “Meaningful Use”

One aspect of the ARRA that has vendors and health care systems on high alert is the lack of a clear definition of “meaningful use” — a standard of performance for health care information technologies. HIMSS offers guidelines for Clinical Diagnostic Support (CDS), e-Prescribing and quality outcomes and reporting, and many of the products on the showroom floor were a reflection of these processes.

Siemens displayed a software data management tool that uses algorithms to extrapolate data from clinical notes, reports and spreadsheets for quality control and reporting purposes. The REMIND Platform, which stands for Reliable Extraction & Meaningful Inference from Non-structured Data, automates reporting and helps free up personnel. Henri Primo, Siemens’ national director of marketing, explained the cycle of required CMS and Joint Commission quality of care measures and the reporting that is required by health care centers. In 2004 there were just 10 quality of care measures. Today there are an expansive 72 measures.

“A lot of hospitals trademark their quality of care, but quality control standards are constantly changing,” said Primo. “What is good today is not necessarily good tomorrow.”

Philips Business Development Manager Eric van’t Hoff talked to DOTmed about Philips’ telePC tablet technology, which serves much like a medical-grade PDA for clinicians. The product is sealed, hygienic, drop-proof, WIFI and Bluetooth-enabled, and includes a digital camera. The tablet is also capable of barcoding, RFID and asset tracking, and serves many clinical functions, including admissions assistance, vital-signs tracking, documentation, and physician order entry.

Physicians Warm to e-Prescribing and Patient Messaging

Atlantic Health, northern New Jersey’s largest health care system, has integrated many of McKesson’s health care information systems, including Horizon Expert Orders, a computerized provider order entry (CPOE) solution, in order to improve efficiency and quality outcomes. In just the past year, Linda Reed, vice president of information systems and CIO for Atlantic Health, saw a 27 percent surge in physician-patient messaging.

“It’s a different kind of communication that is really going to grow,” she said. At first physicians seemed wary of being bowled over by patient requests and comments, but the initial hesitance seems to have waned for many, and support for electronic prescriptions is building. As a result of their Health IT implementation, Atlantic Health has reduced the medication error rate to less than one percent at participating facilities.

Allscripts showcased an electronic health record kiosk, which allows patients to check in by biomedical hand scanning, retrieves scheduling and medical record information for clinical review and allows patients to view their personal profile and health maintenance plan. For e-Prescribing, Allscripts offers physicians an iPhone solution that provides remote access to records and the ability to create orders anytime and anywhere.

A Gradual Process

“The health care industry is not particularly agile,” but hospitals are making the big push to implement healthcare informatics technology by 2010-2020, said Glenn Loos-Austin, a user interface designer for EPIC.

One of the products EPIC featured at HIMSS was MyChart, which allows patients to access charts online. With the wave of new record accessibility products on the market, the issue of patient privacy becomes increasingly more important to address, especially since there aren’t clear regulatory guidelines from HIPAA or federal agencies.

At this point it’s about finding the right balance, said Loos-Austin. We try to adhere to HIPAA-like guidelines in the absence of actual mandates.

Economic pressures and the innate complexity of hospital systems make implementation a painstaking process. Even with the promise of funding, how much and where the actual federal stimulus monies can be applied is still a big question mark.

“There’s a high level of strategy, but no definitive answer as to how it’s actually going to occur,” said Jim Morgan, director of marketing for FujiFilm. The company had integrated and teleradiology-enabled RIS/PACS solutions on view, including the Synapse PACS and Empiric RIS.

Morgan mentioned that one of the concerns of vendors and their customers is the percentage of these technologies that won’t end up being covered by federal funding.

“If only 40 percent of the total cost gets funded, where is the other 60 percent going to come from? There has to be some sort of delta between the two,” said Morgan. Until there are concrete answers, vendors are trying to turn out products that increase productivity at a lower cost of ownership for the maximum use of their investments.

(Original article: http://www.dotmed.com/news/story/8798/)

Touchatag is a new tool for Twitter users being tested by R/GA’s Richard Ting that involves the use of tags on objects, that when swiped, can trigger content to be sent to the microblog. Potential uses of the Touchatag platform, which combines radio frequency identification technology with the bar-code system, include a shopper receiving branded content via an RFID chip placed in a pair of sneakers purchased at a shoe store, according to this article.

(Original article: New Tagging Tool Could Link Marketers With Twitter Users)

When an outbreak of food borne illness from salmonella or E.coli contamination happens, it scares consumers and farmers alike. That’s partly due to the fact that finding the source of the bacteria can take weeks, months, even years.

Spinach, jalapenos, peanuts, pistachios are all foods that share a bad reputation due to outbreaks of bacteria like E.coli and salmonella. But some food safety experts say their problems could be solved by using barcodes.

“This is not rocket science and there are companies in the U.S. who are doing that kind of tracing system today. It’s just not required. Its not mandated,” said Caroline DeWaal, Center for the Science in the Public Interest.

DeWaal says barcodes are used for different farms and manufacturers anyway, so why not connect them from farm to fork?
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“If this barcode had a code that FDA standardized and made recognizable across the industry, the agency could more easily trace these products,” said DeWaal.

Outgoing FDA director David Acheson agrees.

“We get piles of records — it’s pieces of paper, it’s invoices. And we bring them back here and it literally is a paper and pencil exercise. And I think one of the challenges right now that we all have to face is what can we do to make this more automated?” explains David Acheson, FDA.

The answer might be to look to overseas where they’re already doing it.

“Tesco which is the third largest retailer in the world actually has a bullet proof system over in Europe and it’s going to come here,” said Phil Lempert, market analyst.

Lempert says everything the company sells is connected to a computerized barcode system.

“In a matter of seconds you’ll know everything about that product: what truck it was on, who were the names of the employees that were working in that field that day, when it was produced,” said Lempert.

But when a food borne illness breakout occurs, we look to the government for help. Establishing such a barcode tracking system will cost millions if not billions of dollars, something the government would prefer the food industry pay for.

“I would not see the federal government paying for that. The industry needs to step up to the plate and seriously look at what could they do to introduce these systems? Now I don’t think that comment will be popular because it’s going to cost,” said Acheson.

A popular technology overseas that links mobile users to the ever-evolving world of advertising is gearing up for its debut here in the U.S. NY1’s Adam Balkin filed the following report.

It’s a use for the mobile phone that’s taken off in Japan, and now Microsoft is hoping to bring the same excitement to the United States. In Japan, they’re black and white and called “quick response” or QR Codes. Here they’re color and called Tags. Tags are kinda like high-tech barcodes that you take a picture of with your cell phone’s camera. The image then immediately takes you to wherever the creator of that tag wants to take you online.

“Using the camera on your phone, you can read a Tag and be taken to a website for information, you can get contact information, you can be provided text information,” said Kevin Kerr, Microsoft. “So imagine reading a Tag at a movie theater and being able to play the trailer for that particular movie, or reading a Tag for a particular product at a store or a sign at a bus stop to understand when the next bus in coming for that particular bus stop. So these Tags can exist in magazines, you can put them in posters, on websites, digital signage.”

While these types of technologies have been tried in the past with little success, those who own a G1 Google phone have recently warmed to the idea thanks to an application that lets you snap shots of barcodes on products and instantly comparison shop online.

In fact, those QR Codes started a test run a year ago in San Francisco. So why do Tag developers think their concept is the one that will finally take hold? And the other obvious question — why not just link to barcodes that are already all over the place?

“The QR Code and those other things are black and white. They were designed for industrial usage. These are colors, so we have the ability to do logos and other things that are much more interesting,” said Kerr. “If you want to target demographics with this new type of mobile technology you have to do something interesting as well as functional.”

Tags work on just about any phone with a camera, including iPhones. Go to www.gettag.mobi for the free download to make it work.

Right now, Tags are in beta, or development, which means anyone can go to www.tag.microsoft.com and create a Tag for free. What that Tag points to can be updated every day, or even every hour if you want. Microsoft says if, down the line, it does start charging to create tags, any created during the beta period will be grandfathered in and remain free forever.

RFID technology has turned up in plenty of surprising places, but there hasn’t exactly been the explosion of iPhone-related development that you may have expected. The lack of an easily accessible RFID reader may have something to do with that, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped the folks behind the Touch research project, who rigged up a not-so-discreet RFID reader and put it to some fairly inventive tasks. That includes assigning various media to different objects, like a Bob the Builder video clip that’s linked to a Bob the Builder toy, a clip of Chuck Norris kicking a car in the face that’s linked to a Chuck Norris action figure (which doesn’t even have an RFID chip), and a dynamically-updated MAKE podcast that’s linked to a slightly nerdy fellow. Of course, all of this is primarily a proof of concept, and the researchers behind the project see plenty of potential for other applications, including everything from gaming to marketing. Head on past the break to check it out in action.

Object-based media project brings iPhone and RFID together