Touchatag: RFID as a Service

Touchatag (aka Tikitag) is the first commercially available RFID kit bundled with an online service which opens up RFID usage in various innovative ways for the masses

Friday, May 01, 2009

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RFID tagging has for long been used by enterprises for streamlining businesses. But those days aren't far when you would have to attach a new device to your computers at home – the RFID reader, because with Touchatag, you can now have your own RFID tagging system with which you can tag any item and enable them to be traced or accessed for information via any online electronic application.

This idea opens up new avenues of providing service. Imagine a cinema hall providing its premium members with an RFID enabled membership card, which the member can use from his home to book tickets, and their ticket information will be associated with that RFID card. The member can just walk into the hall and the RFID readers at gates will read his ticket information from the RFID enabled card and then he can proceed to his seat without a printed ticket or going through the hassle of standing in queues. Or imagine a not-so computer literate mother being able to make a Skype call to her son in the US by just swapping her son's protograph tagged with an RFID sticker over the RFID reader.

Touchatag is an RFID service that allows you to tag various objects and each tag can be configured to perform a specific task that can be programmed through the Touchatag website (www.touchatag.com). The site works as a platform through which you can link things to the Internet. To start tagging items you need to download and install the Touchatag software from the website and plug the Touchatag reader to a USB port. From the website's dashboard, you can create Touchatag applications that will program the Touchatag RFID tag to perform a specific function. These tag associations can be with websites, applications or other online activity.

We tried the RFID kit by installing the Touchatag software on a Vista-based machine and plugged the USB RFID reader to it. After logging into the website, from the dashboard we created an application that associated the Touchatag RFID sticker to open up a browser window. A tag can just not be associated with a URL but also to start up application activity on a computer, but the catch is the computer has to be online since Touchatag software communicates to the Touchatag website to seek for the scanned tag associated function. So, you can see the options related to using this tagging application are endless.

Bottomline: The service is in a nascent stage, but when an eco-system of RFID enabled devices becomes affordable and omnipresent, then we can expect such a service to make more sense and be of wider use.

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