Friday, January 30, 2015

source - th telegraph - this is a piece of todays world !!!


Many of us are used to swiping or tapping a card to get into the office, but a Swedish firm has gone a step further by putting a chip under its employees' skin.
People working at Epicenter, a new hi-tech office block in Sweden, simply have to hold their hands against the front door to gain entry. They can also wave their hand to operate the photocopier, the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones reports.
In time, they will also be able to pay for coffee and sandwiches in the cafe with a touch of a hand.
It's because some employees have a tiny RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip, about the size of a grain of rice, implanted.  A handful of staff currently have the chip, but soon others among the 400 workers will be given the chance.  On the day of the building's official opening, the developer's chief executive was, himself, chipped live on stage.  And even Cellan-Jones, the BBC's technology correspondent, had a go.  "A rather fearsome looking tattooist, inserted my chip," he explains. "First, he massaged the skin between my thumb and index finger and rubbed in some disinfectant. The he told me to take a deep breath while he inserted the chip. There was a moment of pain - not much worse than any injection - and then he stuck a plaster over my hand."
However, not all staff seem obliging. "Absolutely not," said one young man when asked if he'd sign up. An older woman saw little point in being chipped just to get through a door. 
The chips have been developed by a Swedish bio-hacking company.
Epicenter hopes the chips will soon catch on across the rest of the world.  "Today it's a bit messy - we need pin codes and passwords. Wouldn't it be easy to just touch with your hand? That's really intuitive," said Hannes Sjoblad, the company's chief disruption officer.

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