Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Are RFID standards immune to economic interests?

September 16, 2004 | Comments: (0)

Are RFID standards immune to economic interests?

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In doing research for a column on RFID standards, coming up on September 27th, I had an interesting conversation with Edward Zeng, chairman and CEO of SparkiceLab, a company helping to create China's National Product Codes.

NPCs are like EPCs, electronic product codes, that govern what content, product identification information, resides in each RFID tag.

The difference is that NPC content includes what China wants in the tag and the EPC includes the content that the EPCGlobal organization wants.

It's hard to gauge exactly where Zeng is coming from considering the fact that he does sit on at least one Chinese government committee working out the details of NPC and more widely, how China will deal with whatever standards are set by EPCGlobal. But he also has a for-profit company that is licensed by the Chinese government to issue NPC codes for any company importing or exporting from China.

However, it is also hard to figure out where EPCGlobal is coming from.

EPCGlobal is a joint venture of the Uniform Code Council, UCC, started at MIT as the Auto-ID Center and then turned into an independent entity, and the European-based EAN International.

The question here is, is the mostly Western-based organization pure at heart or are they creating standards that will suit them best?

Zeng feels strongly that EPCGLobal has not included China, and other major Asian manufacturing countries such as Japan, Korea and Malyasia, in helping to set the standards. While EPCGlobal says anybody can join, Zeng believes that's a lot different than being expressly sought out for participation.

Zeng uses some interesting statistics from the cell phone industry to illustrate why China should be included in any decision on RFID standards.

Five years ago, China had 8% of the world's cell phone subscribers while the U.S. had 37%. Today, China has 24% of the market with almost 300,000 million subscribers, more than the entire population of the U.S., while the U.S. now has 14% of the world's subscribers.

Don't leave us out, is his message.

A point well taken. I'd like to know what you think. Send me an email, eph-raim_schwartz@infoworld.com

Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on September 16, 2004 11:21 AM

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