Product identification

Current situation

Currently most retail products have barcodes that uniquely identify a product within a store. There are a wide variety of barcode systems in use, the most prevalent being EAN (Europe) and UPC (US). Both of these schemes are contained within GTIN space, which stands for Global Trade Item Number.

Future developments

Barcodes

In 2005 all US barcode readers should be upgraded so that they can read EAN as well as UPC thus reducing the need for redundant relabeling of products imported in US. Input methods for barcodes are described in Hardware Requirements among other places

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Near Field Communications

Near Field Communication Technology could make this a snap since it operates only at distances under 15cm and enables bootstrapping other short-range wireless protocols such as Bluetooth. If NFC devices were embedded into shelves with appropriate iconic and textual representations it would make for really intuitive access to features provided by Consumerium Services

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RFID

An possibly upcoming technology in Product identification is RFID which stands for Radio Frequence IDentification. RFID technology has raised concerns of misuse, such as covert involuntary tagging wherein you don't know you are carrying a RFID tag.

To counter these kinds of threats we encourage to develop touch activated RFID wherein the RFID tag requires conduction of electricity instead of induction to activate itself. These Conduction RFID tags would be a ecologically sane option for product identification if they were embedded in the retail shelf with iconic and/or textual indexing to products in the shelf for high usability. This way the packaging wouldn't have to contain wasteful, disposable chips.