Admiral Loy and six technology companies honored in DC

May 28, 2009

The National Security Initiative handed its annual Patriot award to retired Coast Guard Commandant and former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security James Loy in Washington on May 22 and lauded six finalists in its business plan competition, known as the American Security Challenge, at the same event.

Businesses Pitch and Regional VC Conference

May 29, 2009

Several Maryland businesses and investors were among the hundreds attending Capital Connection '09, an annual investors conference at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington on Tuesday and Wednesday.

KRA shelves plan for single transport permits licenses  

Written by Zeddy Sambu   

April 22, 2009: The Kenya Revenue Authority has abandoned plans to issue single permits to transporters plying the region.
 
Instead, the tax collector has opted to embrace an electronic cargo tracking solution to monitor movement of transit goods from dispatch at the Mombasa port until they have crossed the Busia or Malaba border points to the landlocked region.

The Israeli company is using a combination of RFID, GPS and GPRS from Hi-G-Tek to track fuel deliveries to gas stations and stores around the Middle Eastern country.

How many more years will we have to read about the value of RFID technology measured against Wal-Mart? Even normally astute business observers, such as the Wall Street Journal, are evidently unable to think of anything else. Meanwhile, the most under-focused application of RFID is for tracking enterprise IT equipment. Why hasn’t this become a common success story?

Every office of every 21st Century company has PCs, monitors, printers, etc. All this equipment possesses a moderate fixed value of the hardware, enough to justify better tracking alone, on a strict cost-to-loss ratio.

There is much greater value in the data on board. When you factor this into the equation, it is hard conceive of not using a low cost system to limit or eliminate loss.

I am not saying your office is crawling with thieves. Most of us have seen what truly happens in an office environment. A fellow employee is let go, or resigns, and her IT equipment (and everything else of value in that office) is cannibalized. Someone takes the printer to their end of the floor, another the flat panel, and that over-caffeinated kid in engineering sees a chance to pick up another PC for his software testing.

All you need to do to prevent this is put an active RFID tag on the items, open up a software package, enter an ID, press a button and you can see on what floor and or what office or area the item resides, real time. If you are looking for a laptop, pull up the last time it walked out the door. Seems pretty simple, right?

"Savi rolls a lucky seven in the global RFID marketplace, standardizing on air interface protocol"

Every country has its own tech standards, a situation that inhibits global adoption by requiring RFID solution vendors to seek regulatory approval on a country-by-country basis from governmental agencies.

Link to Article

Read our article in T3 on NxtBook about Active RFID for Petroleum Distribution.

Sensing Active RFID Standards

Issue #90 | by Erik Wood

Some see managing assets using RFID as essentially giving goods the ability to say "here I am" and "this is my name." Add to that the ability to shape the resulting terabytes of data into actionable information; and who could be blamed if they call that the wave of the future? I would argue that it is just the beginning.

2007 January

RFID Innovations Deepen Market Penetration

As RFID becomes further entrenched in applications ranging from retail to healthcare, companies are developing technologies that will add even more uses.

By Nancy Friedrich

Microwaves & RF Magazine 

View the original article:
http://www.mwrf.com/Articles/ArticleID/14637/14637.html

Maariv (business section), 25th May 2004

‘Lock Smarter’, by Amir Eisenberg

‘Boy, It’s Tough!’ – that’s what frustrated thieves will probably mutter in the future when faced with Hi-G-Lock, a smart lock for the 2000s, if Micha Orbach fulfills his vision. Micha is Managing Director and one of the owners of start-up Hi-G-Tek. The lock that he developed, Hi-G-Lock, got a significant boost when it was approved by the US Homeland Security Authority. This lock does a lot more for its customers than just secure stores of hazardous materials, weapons and perhaps in future also private homes. The smart lock is the pivot of a 2-way communications system. Not only does it transmit a signal at any attempt to defeat it (sending precise details of every event) but it also allows the control center to check the status of the lock at any time.

View PDF of Article >>