At IDTechEx, when we teach Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), we talk of it being a ubiquitous enabling technology like the wheel or paper. Some people consider that to be rather far fetched. After all, wheels extend from prayer wheels, steering wheels and wheels of fortune to aircraft wheels and microscopic wheels in Micro Electro Mechanical Systems MEMS.They are everywhere, as is paper because that appears as anything from art to toilet paper, packaging, books and origami.

However, RFID is now used from Bulgaria to Namibia, from Azerbaijan to Vietnam and Antarctica. It is a life to death experience because it is on containers of sperm and new born babies but it also marks burial plots. The Federal Emergency Management Agency in the USA puts RFID on corpses. Somewhere in between, RFID traces anodes in copper smelters and controls paedophiles. There are well over 10,000 RFID projects out there and there are over 1000 suppliers that have now landed substantial orders for the specialist RFID hardware and services involved. Yet things have barely started. For examples, 50,000 libraries should be tagging everything for many benefits but only 500 (1%) have done so as yet.

The IDTechEx RFID Knowledgebase has captured over 2300 cases of RFID in action involving over 2500 organisations in 85 countries. That includes all the examples we have mentioned above. We are now adding cases at twice the rate of one year ago as RFID truly permeates the whole planet.

RFID is monitoring the post in Algeria and Bosnia-Herzegovina and it being used in the Philippines in the form of Stored Value Cards SVCs to replace cash and reduce queues. Road tolling is a use in Slovakia. For proof of ownership it is on reindeer in Lapland. In precious wild plants in New Zealand, it has led to arrests under conservation orders.RFID tags on prepared sushi meals in Japan permit the staff to automate payment and stocktaking but in Antarctica it has enabled research on the behaviour of penguins. In Thailand, they like to put RFID on chickens for disease control and they use it in cock fighting. In South Africa, RFID tracks ore but in Turkey they encounter it as a loyalty card.

In Canada, they have been tracking food trolleys in their aircraft but Italy has RFID on intelligent mooring buoys in marinas giving personalised promotional messages when you tie up. Australia tags boats for theft prevention. The Australians tag racehorses by law but the Canadians tag fish for conservation. In the UK RFID has been used to research the behaviour of insects including butterflies and IDTechEx has several studies of the tagging of elk but not in China, where pandas are the centre of attention.

RFID is the basis of an automated tour of a museum in Korea and it prevents theft in art galleries in France - an improvement on the crude performance of the traditional anti-theft tag in shops and libraries, which is not RFID. From casino chips in the USA to a multifunctional bank card in Azerbaijan, national identification cards in Estonia, China and Oman, weapons permits in Honduras, laptop theft prevention in Brazil and police evidence bags in the UK, one can only wonder what comes next. There is access control in Mexico, student tracking in India and Japan (for safety and attendance control), passports in Slovenia but they have all been done.

RFID is about Government spending. RFID companies that believe that RFID is all about civil supply chains are more likely to lose money, sometimes spectacularly so. Those that investigate where the money is really being spent and where the competition is lighter are generally prospering, from Lockheed Martin sitting on the world's largest RFID order of $425 million for the US Military and a group of Chinese companies rolling out the $6 billion China National ID Card scheme and other companies salivating about the planned UK national ID card scheme which promises to burn many times that sum giving cards to 15% of the number of people involved in China. Governments have placed the big orders for RFID so far, including tagging post boxes in Saudi Arabia - a world first - and the massive Hong Kong Octopus card scheme for almost all transport and now for general shopping and equivalent schemes to Octopus across China. Sometimes it is local government that has the big chequebook as with mass transit card schemes, something that enabled ERG of Australia to be a US$137 million RFID business with installed equipment from Gothenburg to Beijing responsible for five billion transactions yearly. RFID is even used by the French navy on nuclear submarines and implanted into government employees in Mexico.

Most of the government backed RFID is about security but what made a Swedish company largest in RFID today? It was secure access, with Assa Abloy enjoying something in the region of $300 million in sales from its ten carefully chosen RFID acquisitions in or near this sector.

RFID is about error prevention. Those thinking of RFID for replacing barcodes and at least civil supply chains are boxing themselves into a corner. The biggest RFID application in Healthcare is the 40 million tags delivered for error prevention on AstraZeneca anaesthetic Diprivan used in operating theaters. The many drug trials that have RFID-enabled, compliance-monitoring blisterpacks this year are concerned with error prevention. The TREAD Act in the US is expected to drive RFID into every car tyre for error prevention. The largest milk cooperative in the world, Fonterra of New Zealand, has ordered over 500,000 tags for milk samples and preventing mistakes with pipe connections and, in a way, the tagging of over ten million test tubes used for blood samples and drug development (potential several billion yearly) is associated with automated recordkeeping because humans make errors. Indeed, the tagging of mothers and new born babies in German, US and other hospitals is concerned with preventing mother baby mismatches which have reached 20,000 yearly in the US alone. That is just the reported ones. Beyond error prevention, there is anti-counterfeiting of drugs, designer goods and cigarettes and more that is being progressed ahead of conventional track and trace. It has potential of 150 billion yearly just for those three types of product. Is that really a niche market?

The bottom line is that RFID is being used for security, safety, error prevention, anti-counterfeiting, cost reduction, increasing sales, entertainment, crime prevention, customer convenience and art and there is more to come. It is rather as if we had just invented the wheel.....or paper.

For the truly global major conference on RFID attend RFID Smart Labels Boston February 21-22 2007 www.smartlabelsUSA.com. Attendees receive 3 months FREE access to the RFID Knowledgebase and much more.

For more information please visit http://www.idtechex.com

The Strathclyde Country Park is the beautiful setting for M&D’s, Scotland’s Theme Park, part of the M&D Group which also includes Amazonia, Scotland’s only indoor rain forest. Over the recent years M&D’s has developed into a major family entertainment venue who can now boast that they offer ‘too much fun for just one day’.

M&D’s have offered customers the opportunity to purchase tickets in advance from their Website for some time and online sales were growing, but they were concerned that the site was not visually showing a true representation of all the different activities and facilities on offer for all the family at the attraction.

Sharon Luxton, Sales and Marketing Director at M&D’s explains ‘Often people were visiting M&D’s without knowing before hand what was on offer for them to enjoy. We want people to come here with fresh eyes and discover the variety of entertainment that we have to offer the whole family for a complete day out. Our Website is a vital part of that process, but in its old format it wasn’t working for us, it was hard to navigate through, and difficult for us to update and manage the content’.

The challenge was handed to ts.com’s Creative team who conducted an initial analysis of the existing Website. They then worked with M&D’s to research their target market and get a clear vision of the audience that the Website needed to appeal to. Paul Evans, Senior Creative Designer at ts.com commented, ‘We identified the needs of the target audience for M&D’s and greatly simplified their Website, breaking down the home page into sections to appeal to the different audience groups and simplifying the menu structure’.

Paul continues ‘We then looked at the design with an overall focus on the wide variety of attractions at M&D. The site header, which appears on every page, was designed to pick up on the setting, the countryside of Scotland and the fun theme park element of the site using flash animation. The rest of the site is broken down into clear sections which have been designed to visually illustrate all the facilities on offer at M&D’s, enabling their customers to easily find all the information they need to plan their visit.’

Giving customers the opportunity to purchase advance tickets has also been incorporated into the design of the new Website, with ‘Buy Tickets’ buttons placed prominently on each page to drive visitors to book in advance. And the success of this is already being realised; ‘We have already seen a 50% increase in Web sales for one of our regular Autumn events,’ commented Sharon. ‘Anyone visiting our Website now has access to special offers and promotions that can only be found on online, giving them more incentive than ever to book tickets in advance, and all linked simply to the ts.com ticketing system.’

‘Importantly, we hare also doubled the amount of enquiries received from the Website and are receiving many different types of enquiries, such as corporate bookings, since the new site was launched’

One of the most important aspects of the Website for M&D was the ability to easily update their new site, which has been achieved through the use of a Content Management System that they can simply manage. Other important aspects of design have been covered by the ts.com Creative team; including making the site search engine optimised using more text, fewer graphics and key words high up on each page, and designing it to meet W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, level AA.

Sharon concludes "We are delighted with the support that ts.com have given us, they are so attentive and make it so easy. From providing our online advance sales capability to designing our new Website that really gives people the chance to see how much we have grown and shows off all the great attractions we have to offer".

Click onto www.scotlandsthemepark.com to see it for yourself!

For more information please visit http://www.ts.com