As you leave the store, you don't encounter security guards or a blaring alarm. Welcome to the new world of smart tag technology. These tags also serve to connect the realms of atoms and bits. During the next five years or so, smart tags will bring IT to places unheard of today. For example, bar coding and tagging is just one segment of product supply chain automation.
Bar code is at the intersection where the physical world meets the digital.
Our industry is no longer a backwater to the big IT industry. People are realizing that as the wireless link between the physical and digital worlds becomes more important, our pieces are very important pieces of the puzzle. Swartz is founder and CEO of Symbol Technologies, a leading manufacturer of mobile data transaction systems that was awarded the National Medal of Technology in March by President Clinton. Such labels can be scanned at distances from one to several hundred meters, using radio energy rather than optical recognition. By driving down the cost of RFID, BiStatix labels will enable individual products and packages to communicate with their environments during manufacturing, distribution, sale, use, and disposal.