Is That a Jingle in that RFID Tag?

Filed in archive Retail on May 2, 2005

Wait 'til the marketing and advertising departments figure this out....

New Scientist magazine reports that a German student has discovered how to include a product jingle in an RFID tag:

"When you buy something at the shops, would you want to hear an advertising jingle for the product ring out across the store as the cashier scans your purchase? Florian Wesch, a computer science student from Durlach in Germany, has worked out a way to store a tune on the radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags now attached to most goods. To squeeze a jingle onto a tag's 1-kilobyte memory, Wesch used the compressed music format employed by the Commodore 64 home computer of the 1980s. When the tag is scanned at the checkout, it would send the tune to be played by the tag reader."

If you ask me, though, someone needs to figure out how to make the RFID tag ring out when the shopper comes near -- as if the product were calling out to the shopper from the shelf. Playing the jingle at checkout is kind of pointless.