Blog: William McKnight

« Data Warehousing Appliances | Main | Business Objects in Business Week online »

RFID tagging the cows

In what may be a precursor of things to come, India is set to use RFID tags in its wandering cows (article). To my knowledge, this is the first use of RFIDs in anything living. However, almost daily we see new and creative uses of RFID popping up all over the place. As the tag price drops, expect more and more uses.

I completed my 3-part interview with Michael S. Shiff of RFIDRecruiters in this month's DM Review Magazine. The 3 parts are meant to overview RFID for the business intelligence professional.

In the articles, I mention a few points of interest:

A fairly recent RFID projection called for 20 billion RFID tags to be used in 2008

As 20 billion RFID tags work their way through supply chains and other business environments in 2008, with each tag reporting data on a real-time or near-real time basis, there will be a lot more information for data warehouse and business intelligence applications to manage.

Jim Crawford, an analyst at Retail Forward in Columbus, Ohio, calculates that if Wal-Mart stored every RFID of every tagged item on every shelf, it would generate nearly eight terabytes of data per day.

Share: