Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Where Ware; redux
UPDATE: on WhereWare, Auto Black Boxes, and RFID tags. Discussion forum here.PAL650 utilizes ultra- wide bandwidth pulses to provide sub-foot precision for the two-dimensional and three-dimensional location of tagged objects. ...The UWB tag itself is roughly the same size of a wristwatch and can transmit continuously for nearly four or five years on a single button cell battery.
This is a great idea, helping hospitals keep track of equipment can save "upwards of $75,000 to $100,000 each month directly attributable to lost equipment." I can imagine that this tech will be useful in innumerable other operations, large and small. Another point made in the discussion forum:
I have found, in interviews, an almost unfathomable hostility to location-based services amongst UK m-commerce operators. Which is not to say that it won't get off the ground: any service provider who is *not* dealing with end-users/consumers on a daily basis (eg, RFID proponents) will probably remain bullish about the technology and cause it to be rolled out. However, non-user-controllable locaiton-based technologies amount to a fundamental breach of trust with users, and the m-commerce operators I have spoken to have made it quite clear that they think that the entire m-comerce market -- and not merely the location-based component of that market -- will shrivel and die if non-user-controllable or non-opt-in whereware becomes widespread.
The discussion must continue. These technologies can be extremely useful [just the car-key problem, alone...] or extremely destructive [ya think people/obsessive stalkers know too much about one from one's blog...] It is as Steve Mann points out; the only smart way to approach "smart objects" is not to give the decision-making capability to the object but to require the person to be smarter than the objects by putting the decisions in the hands of the human.
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