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Sunday, September 07, 2003 |
  CNet. More on Walmart's RFID strategy. What is interesting to me is this statement, which clearly is the Walmart party line:
Each link in the supply chain will look for cost savings to help offset the cost of the technology; by the time the carton or pallet gets to the retailer, each supply chain participant will have partially absorbed the RFID cost. Whatever cost cannot be absorbed in the supply chain will then be absorbed through lower margins but will not be passed on as a higher cost to the consumer.
Two things of immediate note: 1) The level of cooperation here, enforced by Walmart, is heartening and indicates that the rapid roll-out we are going to see at other retail outlets may be extremely fast (don't quibble over costs: do it!). 2) The relentless pressure of Moore's law is rapidly expanding into supply chain economics at the retail level (RFID deployment represents a quantum jump in potential automation over current practice). I wonder what level of productivity improvement Walmart intends to see from these investments?
Two longer term items: 1) Is there anyone working on personal RFID readers and integrating them into home networks? 2) Given that RFIDs are "essentially" printed and relatively simple in structure, when will we see a personal fab for printing our own (I know of lots of things that I would like to tag and trace on my home network)?
10:03:36 AM 
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Dave Pollard's list of the best Canadian webloggers.
9:40:36 AM
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Scoble thinks that Microsoft may be the only company over 10,000 employees that has more than a handful of bloggers. If he restricts that to public webloggers that claim company affiliation, he is likely correct. If we extend this to K-Loggers on corporate Intranets, he is very wrong.
9:29:45 AM
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 I don't know if you have been watching the developments in high-definition (HD) consumer digital camcorders, but things are zooming. The major companies have decided on a standards process (amazing), there is a shipping product from JVC that looks fantastic (with prices as low as $2,400), and more to come (720/60p!). What is missing is a hard drive unfortunately.
Given that most broadcasters and cable companies (my cable company just shipped me a new box with only S-Video!?! and crappy audio feeds, what numbskulls) are not even close to providing HDTV content to fill all the large format screens out there, HD camcorders are likely going to bridge the gap (what are Apple and Microsoft doing here on the hardware side??). The high-definition revolution will be filmed at home.
9:24:11 AM
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Dan Lyke has an excellent idea re: embedded weblogs and weblogs on a chip in this comment thread. I agree with Dan in many ways, but I think that everyone in the future is a programmer.
8:45:33 AM
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 Marie and I saw the Gipsy Kings in concert last night at the Harbor Lights. Excellent! Quiet seafood dinner, cool ocean breezes, excellent crowd, room to dance, and a beautiful lady that loves me. Couldn't have been better.
PS. The Boss was also playing last night at Fenway. It made me feel old. The last time I saw him in concert was 23 years ago!
8:15:29 AM
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Bill Gross has finally launched X1, his fast search tool on the desktop (Web, e-mail, files, and attachments). There is a full-featured, no time limit, free version available. This is a good replacement for the hideous search feature in Outlook.
8:00:44 AM
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This answers the question of whether Zoe can consume RSS (it can already output RSS). It can also post to your favorite weblog tool. I still think the search based associations and simplicity of a Zoe-like tool would blow away conventional e-mail UI (in one of those insidious ways where the functionality was provided to standard e-mail clients and people slowly began to find that they spent 100% of their time in the new interface). Rather than bring the Web to e-mail it brings e-mail to the Web (Yahoo mail and Hotmail just Webified the UI for e-mail clients). This difference changes everything and could, in a fully realized tool, bring an order of magnitude more productivity to users (not just in reading and responding to messages but in publishing and manipulating content of all types).
7:51:57 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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