Monday, April 19, 2004
Open Source Savant Last Saturday marked the first meeting of the Open Savant Working Group.  About 20 of us met at CommerceNet, here in Mountain View, CA to launch this online collaboration.  Charter sponsors of the group include CommerceNet, SVC Wireless and Sparkice Lab. The group wants to develop RFID middleware components that are available under some widely-used open source license scheme.  We haven’t yet defined the scope or specific goals of the effort, but that is a first priority. To become involved and/or track the early progress of the group, join the Open Savant Yahoo Group at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/open_savant. 4:10:39 PM    comment [] The FDA Trumps Wal-Mart Recently I had a conversation with a top RFID expert from one of the 10 biggest worldwide pharmaceutical companies.  As part of his job responsibility he regularly meets with other pharmaceutical vendors, Wal-Mart and the FDA. This person explained a critical problem with Wal-Mart’s mandate for tagging Class 2 pharmaceuticals at the item level during 2004.  The mandate originally called for compliance by March 31 but recently Wal-Mart admitted that its suppliers mostly wouldn’t be ready until June 30.  It’s now clear the suppliers won’t comply until well after the end 2004. As soon as the FDA became aware of the initiative, they demanded that any tagged drugs go through new testing before being distributed.  The FDA is concerned that subjecting the drugs to electromagnetic radiation from reading the tags would alter their efficacy and/or shelf life. So, it’s safe to assume the Wal-Mart pharmaceutical tagging will not emerge in 2004.  It’s more likely that Wal-Mart will adopt RFID at the same pace as the other players in this industry, and more in concert with the FDA’s planned rollout for the year 2007. 3:53:19 PM    comment []