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RFID REPORT

Saturday 14 October 2006 10am

So here we are, the first workshop take off. 10:30, it's a little bit late but, as we are a small group of 8 people, we try to wait for everybody to come. Well the guy from Switzerland, just to disappont the stereotype, takes a little bit more, so in the end we decide to start.

Massimo, the professor starts with an introduction describing how the RFID sistem is composed of two parts: the reader and the trasponder. Then we slip into the see of the billion different applications of these tags. We start from the basic commercial use as product identification. This lead us to Wallmart the company whose RFID application to its product influenced tags price (read article). We then deep more in the water and we find out that we have for sure already used an rfid tag: to pay petrol, to take the highway with the telepass, with public transport cards, or bage, or alarm protected clothes/books/cds/.. in shops,.. As words stop flying in the theory realm and we get to some practical examples, people let doubts and questions escape form their heads. That's cool both for Massimo, that has the prove that he is talking to people that are interested, and for the presentation that shift into the backstage of how different things works. I do like Massimo way of seeing the "theory truth" and just afterwords the "real one".

We have as esaltation of technology possibility, 10 seconds after we listen to the the storytelling of how actually getting a technology working properly can be an act of extremly demanding patience. :-)

Here we have a picture of the main character of this play: an RFID tag. That' s one kind but we have seen there are many different models, the fancy slim one to be sewed into clothes, the tiny one to be injected into dog's ear, cow's legs or arms of good trendy people, the one to be incorporated into a sheet of paper, and so on...
I make a jump of a couple of hours and land in the afternoon, after we had lunch and everybody explained to the others what they are doing, how they came to the workshop...

It's 3pm and Massimo introduce the RFID reader and its software. The software pass from one person to the following one riding an USB key. After everybody associate a video to a tag and, as the software get to the "run" mode, a video is played when the related tag is placed on the reader. I might not describe it very well but all the people that were at the workshop should understand. And as people are courios and like to try out, there is who, instead of video, associate an Mp3, a text file, an image,...they work as well (if not they rise their hand and massimo as a rabbit jump from one to the next one solving the problem). Just .doc refuse to collaborate.

Later on, as usual towards the end, someone asks something that start a conversation that grows fast and develops in Massimo explanations plunging into his computer and coming out with videos, documentations, pd patch demonstrations, technology interfacing possibilities,...

Time to close comes, people faces seemed to me to be happy and a little bit tired. We go back home, ciao ciao.