Why is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology so exciting? According to Cesare Tizi, ZDNet Australia's CIO of the year, it "opens up unbelievable business opportunities."
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Tizi explains how Milan airport is planning to use RFID to track luggage, while the US retail giant WalMart will use the tiny chips to keep track of item inventories.
Following the retail theme, RFID could be used for supermarkets to track items. Thus when an item goes through the checkout, RFID could be used to rapidly count all the items and create an invoice, essentially making check out attendants redundant.
Tizi also sees RFID as important for security, as it has far less development problems when compared to biometrics.
Cesare Tizi continues to hype uses for RFID that have been proven to be ill-conceived. While the automatic identification of airline baggage conveyed single file passing an RFID read tunnel may be feasible, The supermarket cart checkout scenario has been shown to be nothing more that "pie in the sky", primarily due to the fact that the group reading feature of RFID has been found to be largely inaccurate.