More News on Ubiquitous ID Center

The TRON Newsletter for March 2003 has a reference to the website for the new Ubiquitous ID Center, which currently has 52 corporate members.

• "The goal of the Ubiquitous ID Center is to establish and spread the infrastructure technologies for automatically recognizing "things," thus allowing for the creation of ubiquitous computing environments. This has been a long standing goal of the TRON Project since it was officially launched in 1984, and Ubiquitous IDs (uIDs) are essential components for realizing them. These infrastructure technologies include not just the specifications of chips for radio frequency identification and/or contact/non-contact smart cards, but also those for reader devices plus a 128-bit identification numbering scheme, the numbers for which will be allotted by the Ubiquitous ID Center. Validation testing of the electronic IDs is scheduled to begin in April, the Ubiquitous ID Center said."

Nikkei Electronics Asia also has excerpts from an interview with Professor Sakamura on Creating an Open Standard for RFID Tag Chips.

12:49:56 PM    Google It!    

Ubiquitious Networks Links

A collection of links related to Ubiquitous Networks. I'll keep them here.

• Fraunhofer-IPSI Research Institute AMBIENTE Division
• Auto-ID Center
• Accenture Technology Labs Ubiquitous Commerce
• Berkeley Smart Dust Project
• Center for Pervasive Computing (Denmark)
• Harbor Research
• IBM Pervasive Computing Software
• IEEE Pervasive Computing
• Nomura Research Institute (Japan)
• Using Ubiquitous Networks to Create New Services Based on the Commercial and Public Infrastructure (2002)
• Innovative Business Models in the Era of Ubiquitous Networks (2002)
• Marketing Strategy in the Era of Ubiquitous Networks (2002)
• Consumers and Consumer Industries in the Ubiquitous Network Era (2002)
• Industrial Change and Corporate Management in the Era of Ubiquitous Networks (2001)
• Ubiquitous Networks: The New IT Paradigm (2001)
• A Development Scenario for Ubiquitous Networks: Viewed from the Evolution of IT Paradigms (2001)
• More older publications...
• Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab
• Ubiquitous ID Center

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Article on Ubiquitous Networks

News.com has an article on pervasive/ubiquitous networks. Thanks to Rajesh Jain's weblog for the pointer.

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Ubiquitous Networks, RFIDs and Silent Commerce

Silent Commerce is Accenture's take on ubiquitous networks, using "tagging, tracking, sensing and actuating technologies to make everyday objects intelligent and interactive. When combined with continuous Internet connectivity, a new infrastructure for the collection of data and for the delivery of services can take place without human interaction". Accenture has authored some white papers with the Auto-ID Center, who I mentioned in Ubiquitious Networks & RFIDs.

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Ubiquitious Networks & RFIDs

In the Asia-Pacific region in particular, there is increasing discussion around the concept of Ubiquitous Networks and "ubiquitous communications". The term "ubiquitous comes from the Latin "ubique", meaning "everywhere". Although it is still an evolving concept, the vision is a pervasive information infrastructure of interconnected devices where computing, content, and network resources become transparent to users (if you saw the film "Minority Report", it gives you an idea of what a ubiquitous networked world may resemble). Ubiquitous communications will mean the constant presence of networks that permit interacting and exchanging information with anybody, anywhere, any time and with many types of equipment, typically using radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies.

RFID standardization work has been going on in the Auto-ID Center, which involves a number of companies, MIT (US), the University of Cambridge (UK) and the University of Adelaide (Australia). Recently, the RFID Journal announced a new Japanese-backed Ubiquitous ID Center, indicating it was a potential rival to the Auto-ID Center. The piece The Auto-ID vs. the Ubiquitous ID vs. ? from Professor Ken Sakamura's TRON laboratories at Tokyo University explains the differences between the two initiatives.

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