Thin Film Electronics ASA (Thinfilm), a global leader in the development of printed electronics and smart systems, today announced a partnership with the G World Group (G World), a global authentication company specializing in transparency and accountability solutions. The partnership will unveil the industry’s first “smart wine bottle” built using printed electronics technology at GSMA’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) Shanghai 2015
This “smart wine bottle” will feature Thinfilm’s patent-pending NFC OpenSense™ tags and G World’s globally patented SAMSCAN process, providing a compelling choice to global consumers for the purchase of authentic produce and consumables while delivering significant anti-counterfeit protocols for the agricultural and beverage industries. The G World system will also deliver on the new Free Trade Agreement initiatives between Australia and China, facilitating trade between the two countries by providing a transparent and accountable system for producers, governments and consumers.
Following MWC, G World and Thinfilm will execute a live field trial in collaboration with Ferngrove Wine Group, a Chinese-owned, Western Australia premium wine company. Ferngrove is a major supplier of five-star red wine to the APAC region and exports more than 600,000 bottles annually to China alone. With more than 50 designated retail outlets throughout China, Ferngrove provides a direct line of sight from the vineyard to the Chinese consumer.
G World has placed a 7-figure unit order for NFC OpenSense™ tags as part of the agreement with Thinfilm and in conjunction with the planned Ferngrove field trial.
Thinfilm specializes in printing electronics. They produce the only commercial printed rewritable memory, and are now adding additional functionality to our product line, including logic, sensing, display, and wireless communication.
Their smart devices with temperature sensing and other features sell for $1-2 each depending upon volume. You can pack one into a shipping container to know if the product was exposed to temperatures outside of the acceptable range. They sell a lot of devices for anti-theft security (ie fashion and clothes retail).
Printed electronics technology, real-time sensing capability, and near-field communication (NFC) functionality.
Thinfilm is a Norway-based company focused on expanding the traditional Internet of Things into a much broader Internet of Everything using the benefits of printed electronics. Thinfilm’s NFC Barcode and Smart Label product platforms use 13.56MHz Near Field Communication (NFC) technology to communicate from Thinfilm labels (placed on everyday things, at the item level rather than the box/palette/case level) to NFC capable devices, including smartphones and industrial readers. The 128-bit NFC Barcode is manufactured on Thinfilm’s printed-dopant polysilicon (PDPS) manufacturing platform, which enables high-performance transistors capable of handling wireless communication and NFC frequencies and data rates. The payload consists of a mix of fixed ID ROM bits, which cannot be electrically modified for security purposes, and dynamic bits that can the assigned to sensors. Thinfilm recently announced OpenSense technology, which transmits information about the state of a seal (factory sealed or previously opened) to a smartphone. This is being demonstrated in Barcelona in the form of a Johnnie Walker whisky Smart Bottle, which can communicate a unique identification number and dynamic sensing data to a smartphone. The OpenSense technology can lead to improved consumer engagement and can be used to verify authenticity of the underlying product while the seal is still intact. Next, Thinfilm’s temperature sensing Smart Labels integrate batteries, sensing circuitry, optional visual printed electrochromic displays, and NFC wireless transmission function into a single self-contained smart sensing system. These systems use NFC to tell a smartphone or other compatible device whether a food or pharmaceutical shipment stayed within specified temperature limits or whether it became too hot or too cold during transport. That simple data can help caretakers, retailers, and supply chain partners to make smart decisions by providing a real time indication of the temperature behavior (within limits vs. exceeded limits), and the big data pushed to the cloud with every interaction will help brand owners and others to make smarter business decisions based on trends captured by thousands or even millions of units active at any point in time
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