The following are news announcements made during the past week by the following organizations: Checkpoint Systems; InvoTech Systems; Mobiquity; LogiTag; EyeSpy Toys; the New Jersey Institute of Technology; and Major League Baseball.
Global Apparel Retailer Implements Checkpoint Systems’ RFID for Item-Level Source Tagging, Inventory and Security
Checkpoint Systems, a provider of RF- and RFID-based solutions for identifying, tracking and securing merchandise, has announced that a major Europe-based apparel and leisure goods retailer is rolling out Checkpoint’s RFID solution at hundreds of its stores worldwide, and the initiative includes source tagging at manufacturers’ sites. The initiative will encompass approximately 400 million items annually, and will include RFID-based electronic article surveillance (EAS) systems at entrance and exit doors, as well as handheld readers for performing inventory and cycle counts. The retailer is rolling out Checkpoint’s dual-mode Evolve Exclusive E10 RF- and RFID-based systems across 18 countries, and is carrying out an extensive RFID source-tagging program, as well as implementing Checkpoint’s Alpha high-theft solutions to protect high-risk merchandise (see Checkpoint Systems Adds RFID to EAS Solution). Unveiled in May 2013 (see RFID News Roundup: Checkpoint Systems Launches RFID Solution to Protect Merchandise), Evolve Exclusive E10 is a range of antennas with fabric panels designed specifically for use in retail stores. The product line preserves current investments in EAS systems, the company reports, by providing an affordable transition to RFID that simultaneously supports loss prevention and merchandise visibility with a single smart tag. The tag is available in EAS RFID-ready mode, RFID-only and dual-mode RF/RFID. The E10 antenna also supports Checkpoint’s Wirama Radar technology, which can distinguish whether an item is simply being merchandised near an exit or is potentially being stolen. The European retailer (which has declined to be identified) wanted to improve its inventory visibility while enhancing its in-store loss-prevention capabilities, according to Checkpoint, and is also utilizing the Wirama Radar technology. As a result, Checkpoint explains, the retailer is able to increase its selling area by utilizing the valuable space close to the store exit, without causing false alarms that can affect the consumer shopping experience. In addition, the retailer is implementing an RFID source-tagging program with 1,500 of its product suppliers (building on its experience with RF EAS source tagging) to ensure items arrive in stores shelf-ready. That way, employees need not manually check deliveries or apply labels to merchandise before it reaches the shop floor. With RFID tagging performed earlier, Checkpoint reports, it is easier to maintain perpetual inventory accuracy more efficiently than with manual inventory counts. By using Check-Net, Checkpoint’s Web-based platform—which is fully integrated within the retailer’s IT system and the strategically located print shops—the retailer’s vendors can order and receive fully integrated tickets at the point of manufacture, Checkpoint says. The service, which complies with the retailer’s request for high-speed printing and high standards for corporate and environmental social responsibility, ensures the consistency of the brand and the quality of the labels delivered to vendors. The global retailer began the initiative in September 2012 and expects to finish by the end of the first quarter of this year.
Casino Rama Installs InvoTech’s RFID Uniform System, Reduces Labor By 15 Hours Daily
Casino Rama, a Canadian hotel, casino and entertainment resort in Ontario’s lake country, has implemented InvoTech Systems‘ RFID-enabled Uniform System to track and maintain 15,000 uniforms. The InvoTech system deployed at the resort includes Fujitsu Frontech North America passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags attached to each garment item and Impinj Speedway Revolution UHF RFID readers mounted at all fixed reading stations, supplemented by a Motorola Solutions MC9190-Z handheld reader. The system communicates with Casino Rama’s White Conveyors‘ U-Pick-It automated uniform-delivery system that moves specific uniforms quickly and neatly to the appropriate employee’s hands. Casino Rama has a uniformed crew of almost 2,000 employees, according to InvoTech. Helen Cooper, Casino Rama’s director of hotel and resort operations, said in a prepared statement that the resort saves about 15 hours a day in labor with the RFID solution. “With our old system, we had to have people on site 24 hours per day processing each uniform item,” she said. “InvoTech scans, counts and records entire racks and carts of uniforms in seconds. It is a huge increase in productivity. InvoTech also eliminated waiting lines for staff queuing to pick up uniforms. Now they swipe their ID card one time and their clean uniforms are automatically delivered to them.” In addition, InvoTech reports, the solution is helping the casino forecast its budget for new articles, since it tracks how long each garment has been used. Other InvoTech clients include the New York Palace (see RFID News Roundup: The New York Palace Streamlines Uniform Care With RFID), as well as MGM Resorts International, Hyatt Hotels, Marriott, Hilton Hotels, Universal Studios Florida, Wynn Resort Las Vegas and Macau, Madison Square Garden, MSR-FSR Laundry, the Empire State Building, Loews Hotels, Mandarin Oriental and others. InvoTech’s international customers include the Venetian Macau Resort Hotel; MGM Grand Macau; Four Seasons Macau; Grand Hyatt Shanghai, in China; the Burswood Entertainment Complex, in Australia; Sheraton Seoul, in Korea; Resorts World Sentosa Singapore; and Palace Resorts, in Mexico.
Mobiquity Warns that Security Gaps Exist in Enterprise Bluetooth Beacon Deployments
Through a series of tests and studies on various Bluetooth beacons—short-range transmitters that use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology to provide location-based information to nearby mobile devices—mobile engagement provider Mobiquity has determined that significant enterprise functionality lapses still exist in current deployments of beacon programs. The lapses, which involve monitoring, authentication and authorization capabilities, could impact any expected benefits, according to Mobiquity. The findings are a result of the “Micro-Locationing Project,” from Mobiquity Labs, a newly launched applied technology laboratory that explores the feasibility of technology and aims to help Mobiquity’s clients design mobile solution prototypes that integrate emerging technologies. The project, according to Mobiquity, found that there are currently no processes in place to monitor Bluetooth beacons, making it difficult to measure whether they are working or effective. Not only does this impact the value of the beacon program, but it could also lead to significant security risks, such as stolen beacons. With no consistent tracking and monitoring processes in place, beacons can be moved from one location to another with no way to track whether a beacon is truly effective. “In general, beacons have vulnerabilities that can be exploited—and it is important to understand the risks and ways to mitigate them,” says Ty Rollin, Mobiquity’s CTO. “For many of the small beacons on the market, physical security is not addressed in their form factor. Rather, they are designed for easy placement in stores—not for protection against theft.” Enterprises need beacons that can provide for the detection and alerting of unauthorized beacon movement, the identification of cloning attacks, and other social-engineering threats against beacon infrastructure, Rollin says, adding that beacons are typically sold individually or tied to some type of marketing platform or service. “From our testing so far, we have not seen another piece of hardware that would sit within the beacon venue that actively looks for those beacons. Some vendors have an application on iOS devices that can be used by a store associate to wander around and discover beacons. This provides detection of beacons, but not real-time monitoring—and especially not a strategy that could help prevent theft of beacons.” The study also found that beacons are easy to clone, and as part of the project, Mobiquity Labs was able to clone beacon identifiers onto new equipment, meaning unprotected systems can fall victim to crowd steering and other spoofing attacks. What’s more, the lab found that distance is difficult to determine with accuracy. According to Mobiquity, beacons are inaccurate when translating close distances. When placed closer than 12 feet together—a definite possibility in a retail setting, for example—they interfered with each other, making it difficult to decipher one from the other. The lab tested beacons for compatibility with iOS and Android phones and tablet PCs. For the tests, the lab used beacons made by Estimote and Roximity, as well as Radius Networks’ RadBeacon. Other beacon sources, Rollin says, were Apple‘s iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. Android, at this time, was unable to become a beacon source due to platform limitations. “Our testing was focused on how commodity hardware integrated with mobile phones, and how easy or hard that integration was versus the understandings in the market place,” Rollin says. All of these beacons provided an iBeacon BLE interface with varying levels of attributes specific to an original equipment manufacturer (OEM), he notes. The lab, which was launched in late 2013, will look at a new class of beacons that have security built into them. When the lab started, “equipment was limited from the beacon OEMs,” Rollin says, adding that the facility will also examine new testing strategies to mitigate social-engineering attacks and other less-understood issues, such as multi-app triggering.
Laser Surgical Device Manufacturer Selects LogiTag’s RFID Technology
LogiTag Systems, a provider of RFID solutions and high-value inventory-management systems, has announced that its LogiRead RFID solution was selected by a laser surgical device company. The RFID solution will be placed inside the device and its disposable components, in order to certify that only original parts are being used, and as originally intended. This, according to LogiTag, will help maintain the product’s reliability, as well as its end-users’ safety. The disposable components, developed by the R&D team at the device company (which has declined to be identified), covers many innovative surgical applications, LogiTag reports, including hyperhidrosis, endovenous laser ablation, laser lipolysis, laser liposuction and proctology. To preserve the treatment’s effectiveness, each disposable component is set to operate under strict guidelines, including a limitation on the number of procedures for which each item is used by the practitioner. If a disposable component is used past its lifespan, the device’s productivity decreases. The device company will use a variety of passive tags, operating at various frequencies—13.56 MHz, 125 kHz and 866 to 954 MHz tags—with the choice of tag dependent on the device size, disposable usage process and other variables. These tags will be permanently embedded in the disposable components. The readers, solely developed by LogiTag, will be embedded in the laser devices and communicate with control units via an RS232 connection to transfer various information, such as a successful read event and the tag’s unique ID number.
EyeSpy Toys’ New System for Nerf Blasters Puts RFID on Target for Multi-Player Battles
EyeSpy Toys has unveiled an RFID add-on for Nerf blasters (toy guns that shoot foam darts). EyeSpy’s TekStrike system that leverages RFID and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) so players can keep track of who shoots which player, as well as the type of ammunition used during play. The system includes Smart Darts and a Nerf TekStrike Storm Shield, which can be attached to any NERF blaster’s tactical rail and casts an invisible sensory grid across the entire playing field. Each Smart Dart has a passive 13.56 MHz RFID tag (compliant with the ISO 15693 standard) that is read via an antenna embedded in the Storm Shield, according to Danny Rosenberg, EyeSpy Toys’ managing director and the system’s inventor. The company has patents pending in both the United States and Europe for the technology that places RFID chips inside projectiles, Rosenberg says. To start play, shooters select an ammo type (there are four modes, such as Training Mode for single players or TekStrike for multi-player battles) and wirelessly program the Smart Darts by swiping them against the Storm Shield. Whenever the Storm Shield captures tag data from a Smart Dart that hits it, that information is displayed on a built-in LCD screen on the shield, and the appropriate points are wirelessly transmitted to the shooter’s screen via BLE. The shield includes a holder for a smartphone or tablet, which can be used to unlock new weapons, track team statistics and select mission objectives via a free Nerf TekStrike application download (the smartphone or table also communicates with the shield via BLE). The Nerf TekStrike System, which includes the Storm Shield and 10 Smart Darts, is expected to be commercially available in August 2014 for the suggested retail price of $24.99.
New Jersey Institute of Technology Team to Develop Sensor Network for Flagging Infrastructural Damage
An international team of engineers from universities in the United States, Canada and Qatar are developing a wireless sensor network to detect the onset of structural damage on bridges, stadiums and other large public infrastructure, according to the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), one of the universities participating in the project. Other members of the collaboration include an electrical engineering team at Memorial University in Canada, which will investigate electrical aspects of the wireless sensor network, and another electrical engineering team at Qatar University that will install the wireless network and collect the data. The team, financed by a grant of just over $1 million from the government of Qatar, is developing a wireless sensor network that will monitor vibrations, sagging and stresses in order to assess a structure’s ability to carry its load. The proposed system not only would detect damage after it occurs, but would also aim to predict it before it takes place, according to NJIT. The system would alert bridge engineers in real time to potentially catastrophic structural failures or weaknesses, while also guiding periodic preventive maintenance. NJIT’s role in this project is not only to determine where to place the sensors, but also to decide what type of data the system will collect, how to interpret it and then how to make a decision regarding where, when and to what extent to intervene. According to Mohamed Mahgoub, the director of NJIT’s Concrete Industry Management (CIM) program and one of the project’s principal investigators, the sensors will be designed and tested during the first few months of the three-year project. “We are going to test different possibilities for the sensor to be used, to satisfy our requirements,” Mahgoub states. “The factors we will use to choose the sensors will be based on lifespan, efficiency of measurements, transfer and data optimization.” The plan, he says, is to embed the network into a structure’s steel bars before the concrete is poured. Such safety measures, MJIT explains, are an important consideration for Qatar, which is gearing up to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and is presently planning a massive complex of bridges, stadiums, tramways, and tunnels in preparation for that event. Meanwhile, proposals to connect to Bahrain by a 25-mile causeway have been under active discussion for the past decade, according to the university. The project begins in May 2013 with a kickoff meeting at Qatar University to discuss the first steps. The international team will install sensors on a few existing bridges in Qatar, to monitor their behavior, by the end of this year. On the NJIT campus, Mahgoub plans to hire a post-doctorate fellow to work on the system and recruit undergraduates to analyze the data received from the sensors, and to construct graphs to illustrate it. The NJIT researchers will also build a small model bridge to test in NJIT’s structural lab. Mahgoub’s proposed sensor network could optimize efficiency and lower costs by dramatically reducing the number of sensors used to gather data, as well as the amount of information collected, according to NJIT. Sensors would be triggered only when there is movement on the bridge, and not continuously (as is now standard practice), thereby saving time and labor previously spent sifting through reams of data collected in the middle of the night, for example, when it conveys little meaningful information.
Major League Baseball Installs Bluetooth Beacons at Two California Stadiums
Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM), the Internet and interactive branch of Major League Baseball (MLB), has announced that it has completed the installation of Apple‘s iBeacon technology at the first two of more than 20 Major League Baseball ballparks that will use iBeacon technology for Opening Day of the 2014 season. The deployment follows a test of the technology in September 2013 held at Citi Field, the home stadium of the New York Mets (see Companies Deliver New Apps for Bluetooth Beacons). Apple’s iBeacon technology uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and consists of transmitters that can communicate with nearby iOS 7 devices. At Petco Park, in San Diego, as well as at Dodger Stadium, in Los Angeles, MLBAM reports, more than 65 iBeacons have been affixed throughout both facilities to engage fans with their surroundings, and to enjoy customized experiences via their iPhones. Fans will be able to use the iBeacon technology in conjunction with the MLB.com At The Ballpark app, when its 2014 update is released for MLB’s opening day. Complete details regarding new features being developed by MLBAM for At The Ballpark, including iBeacon capabilities, are slated to be made available in March, MLBAM indicates.