^^that's crazy about his post#, and yep we all got issued new id's that have the little gold chip on the front........in fact i even saw comething on cnn the other day about "bio-metrix?"......anyways they said it was going to be the new form of military identification.....i didn't hear much about it, but i heard that.......here's a little artical i read today.........not really about identification, but it's about more computer chips keeping track of merchindise, i just think it's a slow introduction of what is yet to come.......keeping track of people, ect.,ect......
Smarter Shopping
Technology May Take the Waiting Out of Buying
By Jessica Rappaport, Tech Live
Aug. 5 — There's nothing more aggravating than carving a tiny slice of time out of your busy schedule to shop and then having to search for what you want, not find it, and then wait in line to ask the salesclerks if they have that oh-so-terrific shirt in your size.
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Don't get frustrated. An intriguing technology just may make shopping, and selling, simpler and quicker.
Glover Ferguson, chief technologist at Accenture Technology Labs, and his team are working to develop smart shopping chips.
No, they won't shop for you. But a chip the size of a buttonhole would be sewn into clothing tags. These Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips will help salespeople track inventory.
"When a box arrives, one way to do it is open the box, go through each item, and check it against the manifest," Ferguson said. "If every item has an RFID tag, you can push the entire box through … and it would tell you everything that is in it and compare it automatically against the manifest."
The RFID chip goes one step further. Because each piece of clothing is equipped with a chip, Ferguson's team created a wireless inventory tracker.
"We might have an antenna as part of the rack that would know everything that was hung here. Or it could be that this is just a plain rack, in which case, I might have a wand that I would pass over the rack and as I passed it over the rack, each item would [register itself]," Ferguson said.
That functionality would give employees a real-time analysis of what's in the store, what's selling, and what's not. That way, if there's a mad dash to buy hot pink pants, size 6, the clothes themselves would signal to managers to reorder and restock the racks.
Inventory Miracles
David Ishay knows what a pain retail inventory can be. He's the president of a shop in New York's SOHO, Yellow Rat Bastard (YRB). "We have to track or scan every single item. We must know where it is, physically. And that process … sounds archaic," Ishay said.
We took Ferguson to Ishay's shop, so that we could better visualize how this technology would work inside a regular store. Ishay thought the idea was very sci-fi. "Totally revolutionary. It will definitely streamline the cost of keeping inventory, maintaining it," Ishay said.
Making the customer happier is always the goal of any good retailer. Nowadays, achieving that means making the shopping experience move more quickly. Eugene Fram, professor of marketing at the Rochester Institute of Technology's College of Business, has studied retail trends for more than 20 years.
"We're becoming more of an automated society. Anything that enables [people] to move through the buying process more quickly saves time. And that's more time with family and friends, which has become very precious in our time-compressed lifestyles," Fram said.
First Movers
So far only two stores have tried this technology. Prada's SOHO store is using an inventory tracker as part of a new high-tech makeover. The Gap also tested a pilot program in one of its North Carolina stores.
Ishay thinks it will be some time before this technology trickles down to smaller shops.
"I would presume that at first, like with any technology," he said, "it's going to be real expensive and only available to those elite retailers … with I guess lots of money to burn. I mean five years after it's available, 10 years after it's available, it will probably saturate the entire retail community."
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