With the world's most popular sporting event, the World Cup Football a few days away, I thought I must remind my readers that this tournament would be RFID enabled. This tournament would be featuring RFID based electronic admission tickets at the twelve venues in Germany. Royal Philips Electronics had won the contract for providing chips for the 3.2 million tickets that would be needed at those stadiums. The chips would be embedded inside regular paper tickets that could be imprinted with sponsor logos and kept with fans as souvenirs.

The chips would make it difficult to counterfeit the tickets and the tickets could be easily validated when held ten cm in front of a proximity reader. RFID based chips were selected because of the security they offered and ease of use.

This is an excerpt from an article which appeared in a 2005 issue of RFIDOperations.