Sept. 1, 2003—As with many discoveries, this one happened by accident. Carclo, a British maker of high-performance injection-molded products for the automobile, medical and communications industries, developed a process to customize cell phones by printing personal photos on the plastic bodies. Motorola liked the concept and wanted to see if the digital printing technique could apply a photo—and the company's logo—to one of its phones.

There was only one problem. "Motorola's logo happens to be in a silver metallic ink," says Mike Johnson, Carclo's head of business development. "We went to the guy who runs the company that manufactures our print heads, and he said: 'You've got to be joking. There's no way you can get silver metal to go through digital print heads.'"



Unwilling to give up on a potential opportunity, Carclo hired Xennia Technology, which develops specialized inks, to find a way to print metallic inks with an inkjet printer. "Xennia came up with a novel approach that was technically very clever," says Mike Johnson, Carclo's head of business development. "I asked if they could also print copper, and a few weeks later, they said yes."

Johnson knew just enough about RFID to figure out that the new printing technique could have an enormous impact on the technology. It could replace the etching process used for making most copper antennas, which is expensive and creates toxic waste.