RFID sushi

The Asia New Business blog has a piece on how RFID is being integrated into sushi bars to help staff total up a patron's bill:

Historically, Kaiten-sushi restaurants have color coded the sushi plates to signify price category. For example, a cheap plate containing kappamaki might be blue, an expensive one containing o-toro might be pink. In the past, the server would have to count up the mountain of plates upon 'o-kanjo' (or 'bill please') and figure out the price. I was recently blown away by the Kaiten-sushi restaurant in the new Mori-built Roppongi Hills complex in Tokyo, where the waitress came by at the end of the meal and ran a device up the stack of plates. Beep beep beep.

I've been idly wondering if RFID could have some significant uses in the office. Most of the applications I imagine revolve around managing commonly-held resources, or making it possible to share private but little-used resources without losing complete control over them.

Here's an example. I have lots of books in my office. Most of these books just sit there, day after day (book collections are brilliant example of physical goods that are used for a fraction of a percent of their lifetime). I'm okay with loaning them out if people ask me, but I wouldn't be willing to just put them in the library: they'd get mixed in with the Institute's books, and I would have a hard time reclaiming them, or knowing where they are.

But if books had RFID tags in them, and we had readers scattered throughout the office, it would be possible me to tag my books, and to keep track of where they are in the office. I put a tag in a book, it does two things: it lets me identify it; and it makes it easier to share it, because I can virtually "see" where it is.

This would allow me to turn these privately-owned goods (my book collection) into a public resource, without giving up all of my rights over those goods (most notably, the ability to know where they are).

Doubtless there are many, many other uses, most of which would be a lot more interesting than this one.

[via Smart Mobs, with thanks to Jason]

Comments

[Jim]

The new Seattle Library RFID tagged all of the books at the Central Branch, allowing for things like self-checkout. Patrons can take a stack of books up to any number of check out kiosks, put them on an RFID reader pad, scan their library card, click once and they're good to go. Helps with security, too. As the books leave the building, scanners check to see if they've been checked out, alert the right folks if they haven't.

The tagging was done by volunteers before the new Central Branch opened earlier this summer.

[Jeff Winkler]

Some similar ideas, not rf-id, but using metadata to coordinate sharing physical artifacts:

http://www.mediachest.com/users/winkler1/profile.html

http://www.peerflix.com - p2p netflix

RFID would be cool; mediachest supports cuecat barcode readers so it's pretty quick work to take an inventory.

[storage area networks (SAN)]

Spot on, as usual. Thanks!