ARCHIVE 2004

Sparkice to sign agreement with Japan's Ubiquitous ID Center for RFID technologies

Shanghai. April 20. INTERFAX-CHINA – Sparkice, one of China's main B2B trade facilitators, is going to sign an agreement with Ubiquitous ID Center, an institute founded to establish and popularize core technology for automatic recognition of items soon this week. Two parties will jointly establish Sparkice-Ubiquitous Network Technologies Co. for researching and utilizing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology.

As an active participant in promotion of RFID technologies, Sparkice has long been calling for self-developed RFID standards which are also compatible with international ones. According to an article by Zeng Qiang, CEO of Sparkice, Europe, the US and Japan always set industry technology standards while China, characterized by cheap labor force cost, leaves far away from mapping out standards. Hence once Chinese labor force has no more competitiveness, the country will take the risk of losing customers or orders. Kunming, Yunnan Province, has become the first pilot city in China for RFID tags application early this March. The technology will first be applied in tobacco manufacturing and pharmaceutical industries.

RFID first appeared in tracking and access applications during the 1980s. These wireless AIDC (Automatic Identification and Data Capture) systems allow for non-contact reading and are effective in manufacturing and other hostile environments where bar code labels could not survive. RFID has established itself in a wide range of markets including livestock identification and automated vehicle identification (AVI) systems because of its ability to track moving objects.