RFID in Japan

In 2005, Japanese consumer electronics makers together established so-called Consumer Electronics RFID Consortium. Their aim is to develop usage models and international standards of RFID-based product life cycle management for consumer electronics devices.

@IT has this recent story on the consortium. One of the consortium's major goals is to improve the process of recycling. For example, refrigerators, which may or may not contain ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbon. By RFID tagging and tracking information about each individual refrigerator, one may easily figure out the right recycling method for it.

In this recycling scenario, however, RFID tags are not removed after purchase. Therefore, there would be much larger privacy concerns than supply-chain or storefront RFID scenarios. I'd think consumers may want to remove and/or kill the tags after purchase, and voluntarily reattach and/or reactivate the tags at the time of disposal.

In sum, privacy-aware recycling would be cool.

My PingMag article on Mitsukoshi RFID project is up. So, check it out. I took a bunch of photos. Yeah, that's Tokyo's cool bilingual online magazine!

http://www.pingmag.jp/2006/12/15/mitsukoshi-case-interaction-design-for-rfid-retail/

The Suits Company is a popular apparel store that sells young men's suits. Their Ginza store started putting RFID tags on all 2,400 suits on their sales floor. The tags are now used to provide product-relevant information (why their suits are unique and good, and so on) and availability in the storeroom.

The company has been using a similar RFID system for men's shoes (it sounds similar to the ones that are used at Mitsukoshi stores) and consequently they reduced the number of salespeople at a shoe shop (there used to be 3 salespeople. now there are only 2. )

via nikkei

Lawsong, one of the largest Japanese convenience store chains, will introduce cashier terminals that can process all kinds of RFID payment cards including SUICA and Edy. This will start this November and the company plans to finish installing the terminals at 8,300 stores across the nation by March 2007.

via asahi.com, august 31

Mitsukoshi will soon introduce a system that uses mobile phone-like PDAs to read RFID-tagged designer jeans and quickly check which sizes are available. The system will be introduced at nine Mitsukoshi department stores across the nation, including Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi, Ginza, Sapporo, Sendai, Nagoya-Sakae, Takamatsu, Matsuyama, Fukuoka, and Niigata. Nihonbashi and Sendai stores will be the first to introduce it on September 1.

This system is based on the the pilot test they have conducted back in February (recently reported by StorefrontBacktalk). During the pilot test jeans' sales increased by 15.8%.

In addition to the PDAs, sales agents can use personal computers to view sales, orders, inventory, and how many times a pair of jeans was tried on (which is recorded by sales agents using PDAs). The PCs are used to analyse sales, order out-of-stock items, and predict potential demands for each type of jeans. The buyers at Mitsukoshi's headquarter can access the data from all the nine stores.

via lnews, August 30, 2006.

via StorefrontBacktalk < RFID Times

In a dressing room in the huge Japanese department chain Mitsukoshi, half-dressed customers scan RFID-tagged jeans and then use an IP telephone to check inventory and call for more clothes to be brought in.

Japanese supermarket chain Queens' Isetan put RFID tags on all the 2,700 wine bottles at their Shinagawa store and used a smart shelf, a display terminal, and kiosk terminal to provide customers detailed information about wine. This pilot test was part of the goverment's "Japanese Future Store Project" and lasted from Nobember 15, 2005 till January 24, 2006. They found that customers (especially regulars) bought more wine during the time the system was used. THey've used Hitachi's smart shelf -- it has metal plates that spearate bottles electromagnetically. They've used RFID for inventry management as well, using OAT Systems' middleware.

Nikkei has some photos.

ZDNet Asia reports:

Samsung Tesco last year equipped its shopping trolleys and baskets with RFID chips to track customer movements at each of its 69 stores. The supermarket chain is a joint venture established in 1999 between consumer electronics giant Samsung and U.K. supermarket operator Tesco.

via zdnet asia < rfid news