The store, in the Sydney Qantas Club (Terminal 3), will remain in Sydney in July and August, move to Melbourne for September and October and then to Brisbane in November and December.

Qantas Club members and their guests can take advantage of a special deal with a “buy one get one free” offer until December. The tags normally retail at $49.95 each.

The Q Bag Tag has been designed to streamline the bag drop functionality of Qantas’ new faster, smarter check-in system. It replaces the need for paper tags and improves the speed and ease by which a customer moves through the airport. The tag contains world first RFID technology, allowing the tag to be electronically imprinted with the information of the passenger and their flight details.

You can also purchase them online, but they only work on Qantas’ domestic network for now. If things go as smoothly as Qantas hopes, it will roll out to the entire Qantas network. When that happens, look for other airlines to introduce similar measures.

NutriSmart from HannesRemote on Vimeo.

Hannes Harms – “embedding data in food” 2011
Royal College of Art,
Innovation Design Engineering

Tracking certain items for medical reasons is also a plausible use because it helps to keep track of exactly what is happening to a patient and can better help a medical professional to care for the patient. What will happen when a tag malfunctions and says that there are no allergens in a food and you eat it? Can your family sue because you relied on a tag to determine whether or not you should eat it?

Food, on the other hand, is not a practical use of RFID. There is no reason why the food couldn’t come with a small tag that tells you this information instead of a tag that is placed into your food that you must then consume.

Developed by Hannes Harms, a design engineering student at the Royal College of Art in London, these little markers would allow consumers to trace the entire supply chain behind every item in their cupboard, while feeding valuable nutritional information to dieters or people with particularly dangerous food allergies. Kodak, as you may recall, came up with a similar idea a few years ago, though Harms’ prototype extends beyond the realm of medical monitoring. Properly equipped refrigerators, for example, would be able to alert users whenever their stock’s about to expire, simply by scanning the tags. The NutriSmart concept also calls for a smart plate, which Harms describes as an “invisible diet management system.” Just put your meal on the plate and an embedded reader will analyze your grub, tell you how many miles it traveled before arriving at your kitchen and transmit all of its history and caloric data to your phone, via Bluetooth. No word yet on what would happen to these tags post-digestion, though our inner 13-year-olds are giggling at the possibilities.

If the food can keep track of what you’re eating and how much, it won’t take long for insurance companies to want the information. Next will be the advertising companies and the spammers, who will all want a little bit of your money. No government or company should be in the business of tracking what you eat.

There’s little bits and pieces of technology—like an RFID chip—in the new permanent bag tags, and once you’re at the airport you can use one of the updated airport kiosks to check-in. Your luggage information will automatically be linked up with your boarding documents, and you’ll be on your way to security.

Right now the bag tags can only be utilized around Australia, in cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra, and Perth as well as plenty of smaller airports and cities. Of course they’re planning to take over the world with these new little bag tags, so stay tuned.

Frequent flyers get these neat little slices of travel tech along with their fancy flyer credentials, but for the rest of us there’s still hope. Qantas is selling these directly for right around $50, but be sure to affix it securely to your bag. Unfortunately, Qantas isn’t giving out any freebies for lost or damaged tags.

At the moment, the only real drawback appears to be, if something goes wrong between the tag and check-in transfer of information, no one will know where your bag is supposed to go. Otherwise, a passenger’s luggage is tracked nearly constantly. Combined with Qantas’ RFID enabled membership cards and check-in should only take a few minutes, streamlining the entire process.

Read my entire post over at The Daily Censored.

In a bid to set parents’ nerves at ease, a southwest suburban school district has become one of the first in the state to begin tracking students riding buses to and from school each day with Global Positioning System and Radio Frequenty Identification technology.

Palos Heights School District 128 had previously been using ZPass, a GPS technology provided by Seattle-based Zonar Systems, to track the buses.  But now the district is outfitting students’ backpacks with a luggage tag-sized unit that logs when the student steps on and off the bus.

And this will surely work because kids never forget their backpacks and always take them home from school. Children will just get a friend to hold their bags, thus circumventing the system. Once the kid gets off the bus, they aren’t tracked anymore. Good luck finding your child then.

For all you parents that worry far too much, stop worrying. Your kids aren’t in any more danger now than they were 40 years ago. Allowing this intrusive crap into your lives only coddles your children into accepting being tracked as normal for the rest of their lives. You’re not helping.

New Canaan already has GPS and video cameras on all their buses, but is only exploring being part of an experiment testing such tracking. Under the program, students would be carrying an ID card with radio frequency strips. It pinpoints a student’s location, be it in the classroom or off grounds in nearby downtown.

As usual, the company that would provide the tags has brought out the old standby that they would be useful in an emergency.

“In an emergency they would be able to take attendance and know which students were where in a matter of seconds,” he explained.

As has been pointed out numerous times before, these devices are easily defeated. This idea isn’t new and it will fail.

iFace multi-biometric reader is based on ZKSoftware’s latest ZEM600 platform with ZK Face 5.0 algorithm. ZK Multi-Bio processor operating at 630MHz and high definition camera with infra red light source enables user identification even in dimly lit environment. The iFace series or readers are designed by a professional German design company and has ergonomic design. All operations of iFace devices are can be accessed from the menu on the 4.3 inches TFT touch screen. iFace has RS232/485, TCP/IP, ports for communication and also has optional WiFi or GPRS capabilities. Optional built-in 2000 mAh battery keeps the reader functioning in the absence of power failure.

Features included:

Identification methods include Face, Fingerprint/RFID and/or Password
Elegant ergonomic design
4.3’’ TFT touch screen offers friendly and intutive user experience
6 user-defined function keys
Contact relays for access control (wires to door strike or 3rd party panel)
Optional Web server management software via IE browser
Scheduled bell ringing function which can trigger an external bell
Infra-red light source enables user-identification in poorly lit environments
Optional built-in battery backup provides approx 4 hours continuous operation.
Optional built-in wireless Wi-Fi or GPRS for wireless communication.
Built-in contacts for 3rd party electric lock, door sensor, alarm, exit button, or bell.
Wiegand Output for connections to 3rd party access control panels

*Disclaimer: Features and technical specifications are subject to change without notice.

As well as foretelling the imminent demise of the CD and DVD, Professor Scheer said that implanting chips into humans was going to become commonplace. “The speed of the development is not going to be reduced this decade,” he told an audience of tech execs and politicians including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Some developments can already be seen. CDs and DVDs are going to disappear as material sources of information. Wallpaper will be replaced by flat screens and many of us will have chips implanted beneath our skin by the end of next decade.

Rather than being based on pure speculation, Scheer said that his organistion BITKOM had actually conducted research which had shown that a quarter of Germans would be happy to have a chip implanted if it meant they could access services more easily.

“We just carried out a survey and one out of four people are happy to have a chip planted under their skin for very trivial uses for example to pass gates more quickly at a discotheque for example and to be able to pay for things more quickly in the supermarket,” said Scheer. “The wilingness of the population to accept our technology is certainly given.”

The results of that survey are on their website [pdf] . If you look closer at Mr. Scheer’s statistics, 72% do not want an RFID implant.

Stats are hard to figure out, especially when it’s been reported that 1 in 7 Germans want the Berlin Wall back because the country was better off when it was split.