What's in the box? Radio tags know that, and more

IBM plans to announce today that it will invest $250 million over the next five years and employ 1,000 people in a new business unit to support products and services related to sensor networks. The new unit will also focus on helping businesses exploit sensor networks by, for example, setting up computer systems that use sensor data to quickly identify supply shortages and automatically adjust delivery schedules.

"We are moving from batches of information about operations to continuous visibility," said Gary Cohen, general manager of the pervasive computing group at International Business Machines.

The announcement is timed to attract the attention of more than 1,200 engineers and executives headed to Baltimore this week for a trade show that will highlight progress in — and barriers to — the use of radio tags to identify and track machinery and consumer goods.

IBM's goal, analysts said, is to persuade businesses to view radio tagging — one of the hottest growth areas for mobile sensor technology — as just one element of a new wave of information technology outside of data centers that must be integrated to be exploited.

Radio tags can be read in groups instead of one by one, and they hold far more data than bar codes. In addition to indicating what product a carton holds, they can specify when and where that particular item was made and its intended destination.

The new tags, known as passive RFID, for radio frequency identification, are small, paper-thin and cheaper than radio tags like E-ZPass toll collectors because they receive enough energy to communicate from signals sent by the reader. That does away with the need for batteries.

IBM's effort is one of many recent indicators that a drive for widespread adoption of passive radio tags, spurred by Wal-Mart and the Defense Department, is gaining traction. Oat Systems, based in Waltham, Mass., said that Tesco, the British retailer, had selected its software to manage an RFID network that will reach more than 2,000 stores. At the trade show, Oat is also expected to announce a joint marketing agreement with Hewlett-Packard, which has been a leader both in using RFID on its own products and in providing consulting services to others.

Hewlett said it began assigning consultants to RFID work two years ago and now has 350 of them, as well 1,000 other employees working on various aspects of RFID. It also is about to announce a marketing alliance with BearingPoint, a large consulting firm based in McLean, Va., that was formerly part of KPMG.