The Future of Documents

Completely printed RFIDs have been successfully used for the first time in a public project. These “smart labels” were embedded in tickets to a trade show, but also embedded as security measure for documents printed by the german government printing office.

For the first time, these were not just antennas (which are commonly printed) but active devices as well (which were so far contained in a silicon chip that is attached to the printed antenna). Completely printed RFID tags can potentially be produced at a fraction of the cost of silicon-based tags with printed antennas.

This will strongly impact the way we work with paper documents in a future – they will be fully traceable, both in paper and electronic formats. Today, In a Document 2.0 world, paper documents are a break in business processes – sure, OCR or other data such as 2D-barcodes or Dataglyphs can be extracted from documents. However, there are errors, delays and other issues, which make your business process less efficient.

In a Document 3.0 world, RFIDs might be printable by office printers on each document, making it fully traceable, at a negligible cost, and carry a reference to its electronic counterpart. Just like a document in an electronic workflow today, you will be able to track your paper document in its “physical” workflow. Is it on my boss’ desk, awaiting review, or has it been forwarded it to the next person in the review process? (or is it in a trashbin somewhere ?)