Today, I want to talk about RFID - Radio FrequencyIdentification. Now it's become very popular lately. Walmart is using with itssupply chain to tag items with these radio tags. In other words, it's a littledevice actually about that big and it puts out a little signal thatcommunicates with the server so you can track items. It's been used to tracklivestock, employee security badges, even putting little devices in your skinthat have your health records.
One of the most interesting uses of RFID that I found is ahotel in Las Vegas that has been billed $2.7 billion Wynn Las Vegas Hotel, veryplush, plush, plush and their currency is shaped liked this. It's a chip, andin the middle of this chip they're implanting this little radio signal and whyare they doing that? To detect counterfeiting, which is huge in all casinos, todeter card counting and other bad behavior. Now they have that big eye in thesky where they track people, but this gives them a really precise way, not justto track people, but also to market the people. So for example, they knowprecisely when people cash in their chips, whether they're using their ownchips or someone else's chip because every chip has a little serial number andevery chip then has a serial number that's connected to someone's name who gotthose chips, and it's also for sale via marketing. So if they know what peopleare spending, they can determine, you know, which customers are their bestcustomers and give them the comp rooms and the limousines and whatever elsethey give them because in Las Vegas right now, in other casinos, there's abouta 20 to 30% miss hit in terms of who gets those comps. So this will allow themto be much more precise and save money in terms of who gets all the perks.
Now, some casinos are thinking about taking this idea even further,which is not just the chips, but enabling the tables. Let's say that this is apoker table and then have underneath it an antenna that's connected to thesechips so it tracks all the chips on the table so that even at the table, notjust at the counter where you cash in the chips, they can determine what'sgoing on and there are some technical problems. First of all, it's expensive,it's about $8000 per table and it's also a little bit slow at this point, so ittakes about, I think it's about seven seconds to read about 100 chips. So atthis point, the technology is a bit expensive. It's not quite speedy as itneeds to be, but that will change over time and the casino industry is reallygoing to be transformed by RFID and related technologies because it's in theirbest interest, not to let the gamers gain the gaming industry.
