Renee Boucher Ferguson

After a rising tide of concern over the security, privacy and monetary implications of the Department of Homeland Security’s Real ID Act, the Department has handed down proposed regulations that drastically alter its original intent. The proposed regulations, handed down March 1 by DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, suggest using machine-readable bar code technology rather than […]

Events at the state and federal level are converging around the Real ID Act, as a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security confirmed Feb. 28 that regulations outlining technology mandates could be handed down as early as March 1. At the same time, as many as 38 states, under a coalition formed by Missouri […]

Some startling numbers emerged from Salesforce.com’s fourth-quarter earnings announcement on Feb. 21, including a 58 percent increase in sales—the company added an impressive 90,000 net new subscribers for the quarter—tempered by a 91 percent drop in quarterly profits, mainly as a result of spending on the business. Now the company has outlined its strategy for […]

It turns out 2006 wasn’t quite the banner year for RFID adoption that some analysts had predicted–particularly in the retail and consumer packaged goods sectors where fast growth was expected. And it looks like the coming year won’t be much different. Analysts are predicting some pockets of growth–asset tracking and contactless smart cards, for example–while […]

For companies that use enterprise applications from the leading vendors, 2007 to some degree won’t offer many surprises. The top vendors—SAP, Oracle and to some degree, Microsoft—will continue investing in service-oriented architectures and will grow their investments in software as a service, according to industry observers. All three companies will continue their investments in their […]

IBM is building on its existing WebSphere RFID middleware stack with the Dec. 15 introduction of its WebSphere RFID Information Center. The new technology provides a standard way to collect the massive amounts of data that is expected to be created by sensors and RFID tags, and then links that data to existing processes, and […]

The separate initiatives put forth by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to utilize RFID in passports, identification cards and driver’s licenses are coming under fire from various directions. At issue are concerns that the radio-frequency identification method of storing data on national electronic ID cards—the e-passport, PASScard and electronic […]

The Prescription Drug Marketing Act set to go into effect in January 2007 that would require a prescription drug “pedigree” or electronic paper trail on distributed pharmaceuticals, has hit another snag. A federal lawsuit filed by eight pharmaceutical wholesalers against the FDA’s Department of Health and Human Services, has been answered with a preliminary injunction […]

Paul Moskowitz, a Ph.D. researcher at IBM’s Watson Research Center, believes security is definitely an issue with RFID-tagged goods. Along with his colleagues, Moskowitz has invented what’s referred to as Clipped Tag technology to help solve some of those basic security issues. IBM, commercializing Moskowitz’s work, announced Nov. 8 that it will license the Clipped […]

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, at the company’s first European-based Convergence conference that kicked off in Munich Nov. 6, is working hard to show that Microsoft is on top of the tech revolution—at least when it comes to offering its enterprise resource planning technology on demand. During his keynote address on the first day of Convergence, […]

IBM, which has pledged to invest $1 billion over the next three years on developing information management products and services, announced Nov. 2 a deal with business intelligence software developer Business Objects that should help further that mission. The two companies plan to jointly develop and sell new business intelligence-based software using IBM’s hardware, software […]

UC/Berkeley researchers have created tiny wireless “motes”—aka network sensors—that use radio signals to communicate where they are located in physical space. The end goal: an RFID network that could revolutionize the industry with its ability to locate tagged items without the aid of readers. “What we showed in the university was that you could network […]