NOTE: You can rest assure US, Israeli and European military and
national security agencies will immediately use this technology
(if they are not already using it).
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

July 17, 2006

H.P. to Unveil Radio Chips to Store Data
By JOHN MARKOFF

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“The paradigm by which we deal with data-enabled objects and
where we store the data and what the privacy constraints are
will all play into whether this technology will be successful,”
said Chris Diorio, chairman and co-founder of Impinj, a Seattle-based
maker of advanced RFID chips.
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SAN FRANCISCO, July 15 — Researchers at Hewlett-Packard are set
to introduce a new technology on Monday that they say will allow
large amounts of information to be stored on tiny chips attached
to objects.

An inexpensive handheld electronic reader can access the information
by touching the experimental chips, which might be placed on
a painting, a photo, a bracelet or virtually anything else. The
stored information might include video, sound and text.

Company officials were cautious about potential commercial applications,
but said the technology might be used to store audio that could
be read back from photographs, for example. Or, it could be used
to read and modify electronic medical information in a medical
patient’s ID bracelet.

The first generation of chips stores up to 512,000 bytes of information,
roughly the amount of text in a slim novel. The technology was
developed by a Hewlett-Packard Labs group based in Bristol, England,
during the past four years

Hewlett-Packard executives said that the technology was intended
to serve a different purpose from RFID, or radio frequency identification,
tags, which are often used as tracking devices on commercial
products.

“What we’re talking about is distributing digital information
in the physical world,” said Howard Taub, associate director
of H.P. Labs.

In contrast to RFID tags, which store only a few hundred or few
thousand bits of information, and which are readable from distances
of tens of feet, the H.P. Memory Spots can be read only from
extremely close range and store up to hundreds of thousands of
bytes of information.

Like RFID tags, Memory Spots are powered from radio fields emitted
by reading devices, but the H.P. researchers said they would
have new applications beyond the typical supply chain and identification
functions of RFID chips. Ultimately, executives said, the reading
and writing technology could be added to smart phones or other
inexpensive handheld devices.

The Memory Spot chips could be priced as low as 10 cents each
if they were manufactured in volume, Mr. Taub said.

An independent RFID expert said that the idea was intriguing,
but that commercial success was by no means guaranteed.

“The paradigm by which we deal with data-enabled objects and
where we store the data and what the privacy constraints are
will all play into whether this technology will be successful,”
said Chris Diorio, chairman and co-founder of Impinj, a Seattle-based
maker of advanced RFID chips.

One of the advantages of the Memory Spot is that the 1.4-millimeter-square
chips contain a small processor and as a result have the ability
to offer data protection features.

S. E. Anderson
author- "The Black Holocaust For Beginners" a Writers and Readers
book