It's Day One at Smart Labels USA here in Boston, Massachusetts. I will be bringing you live reports from the event.

First, let me give you an overview of the event as a whole -- so far. Then, in subsequent posts, I will bring you detailed reports of various speakers, exhibitors and industry developments.

Overall I am struck by the global focus of this conference. It underscores the global nature of business today. That may seem obvious to many of you reading this. But to others, in parts of American business and the American press, we can tend to assume that the world revolves around the U.S. It takes a conference like this to realize that some pretty interesting things are going on with RFID all around the world -- and the U.S. is not necessarily ahead of the curve. In some areas the U.S. may actually be lagging behind.

Certainly a lot of trees have been killed to report on high-profile mandates by the Wal-Mart and U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). These are important initiatives. But other events equally or more sweeping are occurring. Some examples:

• Korea is engaged in a series of public sector and private sector RFID initiatives. One initiative includes creating a tagged city in Korea with a ubiquitous computing environment -- quite ambitious.

• The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is implementing the US-VISIT program. Initially this has started as a limited trial at five land ports on the Canadian and Mexican borders. However, you have to look on it as a continuum, with the ultimate goal sweeping in scope. And what is the ultimate goal? It is an integrated biometric RFID entry-exit system that will impact the Western Hemisphere. It will enable ground vehicles to pass through the borders without coming to a stop. The system will include a biometric feature that ensures that the person passing through is indeed the person to whom the travel permission was granted.

• Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in 2005 set up a technical innovation center, and one of the initiatives there involves gearing up production of RFID tags and smart tags -- with a capacity of 1 billion tags per annum by 2007. One of the uses the tags will be put to is a trial involving tagging every item in supermarkets in Saudi Arabia and Dubai.

• Livestock tagging using RFID tags is mandated in various parts of the world. The U.S. in this regard is somewhat out of sync, as the U.S. does not require this as of today.

These are just some of the global initiatives and implications of RFID today.

More reports to follow.