Report: The Future of RFID Smart Cards Looks Bright
This post is sponsored by IBM's A Smarter Planet blog, where it has also been cross-posted.
In recent posts we've looked at three of the world's leading RFID-powered Smart Cards: Japan's cutting edge Suica Card, London's Oyster Card and Hong Kong's long-running Octopus Card. The most conservative of those three, the Oyster card, can only be used on London's public transport system. However that alone is a huge mainstream market for RFID chips. What's more interesting though is how Smart Cards are being used in Japan and Hong Kong.
In both countries the cards (and other devices, such as phones and watches) may be used to purchase goods from selected shops. It's more pervasive in Hong Kong, where the Octopus can be used at more than 1,000 merchants. Furthermore, in Hong Kong the card can be used as an access device for places like apartment buildings and schools.
Hong Kong is leading the way in the use of smart cards, but how is the overall RFID smart card market tracking?
A report released last month by VDC Research Group looked at the global demand for RFID Smartcards. Despite the economy and difficulties in implementing RFID products, VDC believes that "the future remains bright for the RFID Smartcards market."
According to VDC Research Group, RFID smartcards revenues were nearly US$700M in 2008 and are predicted to grow at more than 26% per annum through 2013.
Image: VDC Research Group
Most interestingly, VDC stated that "several emerging applications are quickly approaching their tipping points." VDC mentions contactless payment and ticketing as examples. Both are already features of the Octopus Card in Hong Kong.
At ReadWriteWeb we'd argue that RFID smart cards for ticketing on public transport has already tipped. Just look at the number of cities across the world that use smart cards for that purpose.
What hasn't yet tipped, in our estimation, is using smart cards for a wider range of purposes - shopping, access to buildings, e-commerce, a range of identity purposes. Hong Kong has, over the past decade, developed into a great test case for many of those things. What's more, the citizens of Hong Kong appear to have few privacy and security concerns. However we suspect those issues would be much more high profile in, say, the United States.
We've only seen the beginning of RFID smart card use cases, although Asia is clearly ahead of the curve. What we're most looking forward to is web applications built off an RFID smart card platform. Japan's Suica Card has begun to do that, with its Suica-enabled posters. But there's much more to come.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
yaa really it seems to be.Is this statistic will pointing to the right position or it is satisfying the final targets.Thanks for posting.
I have wondered why no one is making the battery cover on phones be a smart card, seems to be a natural place to put one.
Interchangeable, based on location or intent. Remove the smart card battery cover to eliminate the contact-less near field function all together.
There are HUGE privacy issues with RFID chips being in everything. They are a beacon that just broadcasts when any device that asks (scanners cost $250 and anyone can buy one). If we believe in privacy and the freedom of people to move around without being tracked and traced then we need to look seriously at the unintended consequences with wide deployment. The privacy commissioner of Ontario is here talking about finding RFID enabled identity documents that have on-off switches.
http://www.cbc.ca/searchengine/blog/2009/03/podcast_24_is_up.html
The State of New South Wales in Australia is one of the few failed "implementations" of RFID Smart Cards for transport as it was never really implemented. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcard. Whether is really was a failure of aspects of the technology as the article says, or issues with the drivers unions or issues with the complex Sydney ticketing system, we will probably never know, but we are now left with this archaic system of paper based tickets that run out after 10 uses or 1 week.
Having been to London and seeing how well the Oyster card system works, It is just such a huge difference getting on Sydney transport each day and stuffing about with these stupid paper tickets.
I can not see a day in the short to medium term where someone from the completely inept NSW government will have the balls and stand up and say, we must implement this technolog! And then Sydney will fall further and further behind, especially as a tourist destination where people find it easy to get around in (like London).
The next trick is:
Putting the RFID on the MicroSD card (where you store your pictures and mp3)
Then any personal device becomes a RFID system: Mobile phone, MP3 player, even your camera.
http://www.secureidnews.com/2008/12/05/g-d-announces-mobile-security-card?tag=Logical_Security
Link to the IBM blog in the preface to the article is broken. The correct link is http://asmarterplanet.com/