r and Woodland were graduates at the Drexel Institute of Technology and were responding to a local food store's request for an automated method of reading product information. It took twenty five years for the idea to evolve and for standards to be agreed, mostly getting agreement on the Universal Grocery Products Identification Code that evolved into the Universal Product Code. The first UPC scanner was installed in a supermarket in Ohio in 1974. The first product to have a bar code was a packet of Wrigley's gum. Bar codes are now ubiquitous, but it has taken another 25 years for this to happen. Bar codes have taken over 50 years to become universally adopted. Hitachi and HP could not afford to wait that long. 19.10 Summary Optical bar codes provide an example of a product that is now an integral part of everyday life. The enabling idea was simple but required an enabling technology (optical laser scanning) to be available together with universal application standards in order to support ubiquitous deployment. Today we have a new generation of MEMS-based enabling technologies that are allowing us to build supersmall devices that can collect and store information and/or perform identification or labelling tasks that help us to interact more efficiently with the physical world around us. It is tempting to position the cellular phone as the 'device of choice' for communicating with this new generation of microdevices. The technical logic is that it is relatively easy to extend the present communications systems within the phone to include phone-to-device and device-to- phone communication applications. However, commercial logic suggests the business models to support these mass-market application sectors will take some years to emerge. Consumer applications at the time of writing look as though they may take off, provided there is wide enough support from the handset vendor community. Examples on the RFID Journal web site at June 2011 included contactless wrist bands for the Isle of Wight Festival, ticketless check