It all started with a link someone sent me to the Ubicomp and Shopping weblog, which is in Japanese. Even though I cannot read Japanese, the weblog has some great links (in English) to RFID articles.

From there I just had to find out what the "ubicomp" in the weblog's title meant.

It turns out that "ubicomp" is short for "ubiquitous computing." Ubiquitous computing is an entire body of thought for a futuristic view of how the world interacts with computers.

In ubiquitous computing, computers fade into the background of our lives. Not because computers are no longer around, but because they are everywhere, and so tiny and so integrated into our surroundings that we don't see them. We come to rely on them for everything. According to the founder of ubiquitous computing, Mark Weiser, of the Palo Alto Research Center:

"It is invisible, everywhere computing that does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere."

RFID plays a key role in ubiquitous computing. With speck-sized RFID chips embedded on items around us, transmitting data to RFID readers, where the data then ends up in a computer and can then be used for some purpose, we are on our way toward a state of ubiquitous computing. Depending on your point of view, that's either very good or very bad.

Now, back to the weblog that started me on my discovery of ubiquitous computing. The Japanese weblog is associated with a website, www.ubiks.net, which is written in English. Although ubiquitous computing may be a future thing, the website is all about how even today we can use computers and wireless technologies such as RFID to enhance the shopping experience -- "smart shopping." There is a neat English-language Flash slideshow demonstrating how some of these technologies will be used to make shopping more fun and information-enriched.