Touchatag: RFID as a Service

RFID tagging has for long been used by enterprises for streamlining businesses.

But those days aren't far when you would have to attach a new device to your

computers at home — the RFID reader, because with Touchatag, you can now have

your own RFID tagging system with which you can tag any item and enable them to

be traced or accessed for information via any online electronic application.

This idea opens up new avenues of providing service. Imagine a cinema hall

providing its premium members with an RFID enabled membership card, which the

member can use from his home to book tickets, and their ticket information will

be associated with that RFID card. The member can just walk into the hall and

the RFID readers at gates will read his ticket information from the RFID enabled

card and then he can proceed to his seat without a printed ticket or going

through the hassle of standing in queues. Or imagine a not-so computer literate

mother being able to make a Skype call to her son in the US by just swapping her

son's protograph tagged with an RFID sticker over the RFID reader.

Touchatag is an RFID service that allows you to tag various objects and each

tag can be configured to perform a specific task that can be programmed through

the Touchatag website (www.touchatag.com). The site works as a platform through

which you can link things to the Internet. To start tagging items you need to

download and install the Touchatag software from the website and plug the

Touchatag reader to a USB port. From the website's dashboard, you can create

Touchatag applications that will program the Touchatag RFID tag to perform a

specific function. These tag associations can be with websites, applications or

other online activity.

We tried the RFID kit by installing the Touchatag software on a Vista-based

machine and plugged the USB RFID reader to it. After logging into the website,

from the dashboard we created an application that associated the Touchatag RFID

sticker to open up a browser window. A tag can just not be associated with a URL

but also to start up application activity on a computer, but the catch is the

computer has to be online since Touchatag software communicates to the Touchatag

website to seek for the scanned tag associated function. So, you can see the

options related to using this tagging application are endless.

Bottomline: The service is in a nascent stage, but when an eco-system

of RFID enabled devices becomes affordable and omnipresent, then we can expect

such a service to make more sense and be of wider use.